Читать книгу Parris Mitchell of Kings Row - Henry Bellamann - Страница 7

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The creek bent like a silver crescent around the von Eln place. As Parris followed it for a little way, he realized that his expeditions down the creek had always taken on the color and flavor of real adventure. The sparse young rose leaves of early spring had become dense masses of deepest green. On the low hills rising from the opposite bank there was already a touch of yellow and red that presaged autumn. But here along the creek the intense green of summer persisted. The shadows resting on the shallow waters were inky, but in the sun-splashed stretches the small rocks, washed by years of running water, made a pink and yellow mosaic that took his breath.

Summer at high tide. A curious blend of opulent fulfillment and adumbrated decay. There was still something of spring—if no more than the remembrance of April anticipations and seeing them in full realization; there was the very peak of summer; and there was in the look of surfeit that rested on all vegetation enough of autumnal melancholy without the despair of the actuality when the end is at immediate hand.

At this time there were always mysterious things going on, he thought. Little dry bushes beside the rutted roads would rattle suddenly when all too evidently the day was windless. Curious.

Retracing his steps to the entrance of the avenue, he heard the song of a hidden bird in the branches above him. He paused and listened as the thin music laced the air. In a moment like this he could believe himself to be an acolyte, wonderingly lighting the seven tapers in the ecstasy of communion.

From the top of the old familiar stile he looked up the long avenue leading to the house. The scene was more ragged and neglected than he had expected. It had been so well kept when his grandmother owned it; and even when he had revisited it after his five years of absence in Europe, it had been in beautiful condition—kept so by the state, which had bought it for an experimental station. But since it had been closed for lack of space for expansion, it had been neglected. The house was boarded up and weeds were taking the gardens.

Parris thought soberly that it was here he had felt the first faint thunders of conflict—a conflict that began when the opposed strains of his ancestry merged in the making of his troubled flesh and bone. Now it seemed to be sharpened by the tangle of silent, growing things.

Bees zoomed by him. Grasshoppers shot here and there with minute creaking sounds. A butterfly wavered on a thistle bloom. He turned aside to avoid stepping on a small green lizard that was basking in the afternoon sunshine, and began to walk rapidly down the slope toward the pond which had been his “secret lake.” There had been a time when that place was his untroubled Eden, but that world had receded, had turned infinitely strange, and had come to rest in a profound unknown. He had a strange compulsion to recover it—that world of Renée—that familiar and lovely world that was lost to him.

The secret lake lay at his feet—the little stretch of water, clear and serene under the light that was already slanting a little, already shifting from hard silver to softer gold, in a way that to his eyes marked the real turn of the day. There it was, hemmed in by the encircling wiry grass and the overhanging willow trees, familiar yet unreal, with that peculiar quality of something untouchable that invests leaves and flowers seen through the glass walls of a hothouse.

He sat down on the flat rock he remembered so well, clasping his hands about his knees as he used to do when he came here to think. He summoned a clear vision of his grandmother as she walked about the place, making suggestions about the plantings or laughing at the small mishaps that would have annoyed a less gay personality. He remembered once when a gardener had complained of the encroaching poppies that seemed to spread with such incredible greediness, how she had laughingly said, “But poppies are so much handsomer than cabbages!” Dear, dear gran’mère. How sweet and how good she had been. Her going, when he was eighteen, had left him entirely bereft, entirely without anchor, facing with frightened misgivings a future barren of home ties.

He thought gratefully of his dearest friend, Drake McHugh, who had taken him into his home and had stood between him and utter despair during those bad days. Drake—what a generous, unselfish, loyal friend Drake had proved to be! Poor, ill-fated Drake, who had turned to him in his last days of pain and illness with a pathetic faith that he would help him. No other friend could ever take the place of Drake McHugh in his heart.

And there beside Drake stood Randy. She had fought so against the fate that was overtaking Drake. Together she and Parris had created a life of usefulness for his poor, maimed body. By her devotion she had staved off death itself for a long time.

What a wonderful woman Randy really is, Parris thought. There was a heart-stirring warmth in her low-pitched voice—a warmth that always stayed with him after he had left her. He felt a faint stir in his blood, like the ripples made by a wind whose casual passing troubles the shy silver of a stream. For a moment he sat very still, scarcely breathing, listening to the quiet hush of the woods. The windless air seemed to be waiting—and afraid.

Insistently his thoughts returned to the past. He tried to summon a clear vision of Renée, the blond child-sweetheart, as she was on that last tragic day. He shuddered, recalling the sound of her pitiful crying under the brutal beating she had suffered as punishment for their innocent love-making. He remembered his own helplessness to protect her from her father’s rage. He had lost her through the blind stupidity of older people who could not understand the importance of that lyric episode, but she had become to him the very imago of youth.

Thinking of his whole life up to now, there had been, he decided, more tragedy than should have shadowed the life of so young a man. He felt as though he had stood alone on a hilltop while the elements raged about him. He knew that all his past had gone into the building of his character and behavior, and he was conscious of the depth of the imprint it had made on his spirit.

I am about to feel sorry for myself, he thought, and rose determinedly. He shook himself free of the images. No matter how deeply he yearned for the old companionship of his familiar haunt and the comfort it had brought him in his youth, its response was gone and he knew himself to be no longer a harmonious integer of the sum of existing things.

He walked slowly toward the old stone house, recalling details of the place as he had known it in his childhood. It was foreign in style, the grounds more elaborate than was customary in this part of the country; there were bricked terraces, a long avenue of cedars, and the many walks were bordered with hollyhocks and other old-fashioned flowers. Between were small beds of vegetables. It was a combination of frivolity and usefulness that elicited sniffs of disapproval, he had been told, from many in Kings Row who scorned a strawberry patch surrounded with ruffles of flowers as a “foreign affectation.”

He caught his breath as he came in sight of the walls warmed by the afternoon sun. The mossy flagging was touched with a curious green gold. Vines against the house dragged at the wooden shutters. Box hedges, grown fat and old, edged the walks where ancient red bricks sank into the soil under a thin velvet of green moss. There was a bitter odor from the box, hot in the sun, and the crushing sweetness of tuberoses seemed to come to him from many years away.

The long avenue stretched straight from the house, a green tunnel with a deceptive look of coolness. But here, he thought, here in this garden, he had long ago begun to ask questions of destiny. Here he had faced the enigma of existence, had pondered beginnings and ends, had even demanded reason of the present. Again he was trying to gain a foothold, to establish geography and say, “Here am I—here, and here, and here.” He was casting out feelers like the vines that snaked through the hedges and fought to take hold of the unresponsive sand.

An old willow tree looked secretly busy, acutely intent, he thought, like a top that sleeps when it spins. Busy being green and holding on deep in the ground with its fingered roots, reaching deeper and deeper and holding tighter and tighter each day in that desperate seriousness of hidden purpose which expressed itself in every leaf that hung without a quiver in the thin air.

Suddenly Parris knew what he must do. If he hoped to recapture any of that past which was so dear and yet so painful to him, he knew that he must come back here to live. The impulse was so strong that he was almost choked with excitement. Many times in his life decisions had been reached in this incredibly swift urgency—an urgency too compelling to be resisted or delayed.

Randy was the best real-estate agent in Kings Row and she would be able to buy it for him. Randy would help him—Randy could always be depended upon—no matter what was needed.