Читать книгу Vanessa - Hugh Walpole - Страница 12

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I must write to-night to banish some of this intolerable melancholy that has seized me. There is a real Cumberland wind wailing about the house, as though it had lost a thousand children. How sharp and strong it must be on the Tops! Almost impossible to keep your feet with the black heavy clouds driving furiously like chariots above you, and all the streams preparing for rain.... I have not been so well these last days and I have an assurance in my breast that my time now is short. I had my evening meal in my room and Vanessa came up to talk to me. I was allowed a fire and by the light of two candles we chatted, comfortably, easily, like the old friends we are. Why was it that I had so dreary a sense that this was to be our last talk? Nonsense, of course, and in the morning, as has happened so often before, feeling well again I shall laugh at my past terrors. But as I sat opposite over the fire I put out my hand to touch her dress as though I were frightened to lose her, and she drew her chair over to mine. She was cheerful and nonsensical as she often is, laughing at Phil Rochester who had been reading her some of his poems, one called ‘The Lovers’ Last Cry’ which was, I gathered, especially comical. Benjie is staying in Keswick. She is sure that he has some attraction there and takes it quite calmly. All she said about that was:

‘When we marry and are together, I’ll make him happy, I know.’

And to that I said:

‘You’ll have to beat him once a week. He says so himself.’

How I hate to leave her no one knows but me! She talked about herself, a thing that she very seldom does.

‘I find that I’m intolerant, Papa. Intolerant and impatient.’

‘Very well,’ I said. ‘Those are not bad things to be.’

‘I was so angry with Timothy to-night that I could have smacked him. He was so extremely self-satisfied. I think all men are except yourself. Why should he talk as though he had made England?’

‘That’s a Herries habit,’ I answered.

‘Yes, but it’s also something masculine. We were talking about Moody and Sankey and the Salvation Army and he said that such things weren’t English. Englishmen never show their emotions, he said, and that’s why England is what it is. What he meant was, “I never show my emotions and that’s why England is what it is.”’

‘There’s something in what he says,’ I answered.

‘Oh, well, I wanted to scream and beat that hideous Indian gong in the hall. Then he said that The Story of an African Farm is a disgusting book and ought to be burnt. When I asked him about it I discovered that he had only read the first chapter. And then after that he was going to say something about Benjie, but Violet stopped him.’

‘Altogether a very pleasant meal,’ I said.

‘But why are we so different, you and I, from Timothy and Violet?’

‘Two halves of the whole,’ I told her. ‘Life isn’t complete without both of us.’

I could see that in reality she was deeply dissatisfied with herself. She is maturing, and I am sure that this long uncertain time with Benjie is affecting her seriously, although she is too proud to say anything about it.

She sat close to me, holding my hand, her splendid noble head raised high, looking into the fire.

‘Well, I’m a perverse creature,’ she said, nodding. ‘I seem to have no control over myself at all.’

‘But you have,’ I assured her. ‘You see you didn’t bang the table and you didn’t beat the gong.’

‘No, but I can’t be rational, the thing that all nice women ought to be. I laugh when I should be serious, I’m angry when there’s nothing at all to be angry about. I’m not at all proper in my feelings either. Violet thinks it dreadful to mention the word adultery. She positively said the other day that the Commandments in church made her quite shy. She thinks it dreadful to be seen with a French novel. Oh! I do hope I’m not going to be a prig!’

I laughed at that.

‘Why, no, I should say the very opposite.’

‘No, but, Papa, virtuous about other people being not virtuous! ... In fact I hate myself to-night. Everything is wrong but you.’

She kissed me, laid her cheek against mine, made a fuss of me, told me again and again how she loved me, asked me to forgive her for all the trouble that she had been to me. Never was she more sweet, never more my friend and companion. Before she went she turned at the door and blew me a kiss with her hand, laughing and saying: ‘And now I’m going to the drawing-room to listen to Timothy telling us out of The Times what he would do if he were Gladstone.’

To-morrow we are going for a drive.

This is the end of Adam’s Journal. They were the last words that he ever wrote....

He lay in bed for a while, rather wide-awake, watching the shadows from the fire leap on the wall, hearing the wind scream about the house, tug at the window-panes, belabour the trees and hammer the tendrils of the vines against the glass. He thought of the cottage at Cat Bells, how cosy, warm with life and human affections. He had brought there many of his mother’s things, her books, some pictures, the account she dictated to Jane of her early days, bound in a fat green leather volume, the presentation that they made her on that fatal Hundredth Birthday. Vanessa would have these things and would pass them on, pass them on to her children and Benjie’s, and they to theirs, and so it would go on and on, until at length it might be that it would only be through Judith’s green book that anyone knew that once a man sold a woman at a Fair or fought for his beloved on Stye Head.... He was growing sleepy. He laid his hand on his breast inside his shirt as though to say good-night to his heart and request it, as a favour, to keep quiet for an hour or two. He did not want to wake sharply to that grinding pain, that squeezing of the muscles between two inhuman fingers, that beating and struggling for breath.... He was falling asleep and a stout man was riding on a horse and he a little boy as bare as your hand danced to annoy him and the stout man raised his whip ...

He awoke. What had roused him he did not know. He sat up, resting on his arm. He was so deeply accustomed now to find himself woken at night by pain that that was his first thought: ‘Where is the pain this time? Which part of me is misbehaving?’ But there was no pain. His heart beat calmly and his back did not ache. He had no neuralgia across his forehead. The room was intensely dark. Many hours must have passed since he fell asleep, for the fire had been strong. Now there was no glimmer of dying log or fading coal. The wind was roaring like a beating lively voice in the darkness but, listening, he heard something beyond the wind—a small chattering whispering voice. Was there someone in the room? No, it sounded like several voices, human and yet not human. He raised his head, sniffing. A moment later he was out of bed. Somewhere something was on fire. He opened the door and a belly of smoke blew towards him. He cried out: ‘Fire! Fire!’ and ran back into the room. It was then that the strange stillness of everything struck him. The house slept like the dead, he heard clocks ticking and somewhere a snore.

He pulled on a dressing-gown, and again, calling out ‘Fire! Fire!’, ran into the passage. His first thought was of Vanessa. He knew that her room was on the floor above his and, covering his mouth with his arm, turned towards the stairs, but even as he did so the passage to the left leading to the servants’ quarters began—as it seemed to his excited imagination—to tremble, and a moment later through the green-baize door there shot a tongue of fire exactly like a vindictive criminal struggling to be free. A second later the flame shot upwards and little tongues began to lick the green baize, and a thin line of light, clear as day, shone between the hinges and the wall. At the same time the smoke rising in the same direction began to roll in thick grey waves, and the voices that it contained grew louder and angrier. What was strange was that the rest of the house, his room, the staircase from the hall, was cold, quiet, aloof, and even as he turned to the stair leading to the other floor he heard the cuckoo-clock that was at the corner of the hall below begin to sound the ridiculous bird’s voice: ‘Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo!’

Still calling out and wondering in a mad irritation why nobody had been aroused by all this commotion, he stumbled up the stairs but, half-way up them, was met by another curling strand of smoke that seemed to issue from the wall on his left. For some reason that smoke bewildered him. It increased very rapidly, seeming to come from below him and to encircle him, to beat about his head, to come even from within himself, from his heart and lungs. He should now have been outside Vanessa’s door, but he did not know where he was, for his eyes were blinded and weeping with the bitter and acrid thickness that now began to fill his mouth and heart and lungs.

He knocked his knees against a box or a chair, heard something fall somewhere and, turning his head, saw below him spurts and whirls of flame and a light that had a ferocity in it and a gigantic sense of power. He called out again and thought that some voice answered him, but he spoke against a wall, almost as though some enemy held a cloth over his mouth to deaden his cries. He thought: ‘But this is absurd! Where are they all? What are they doing?’ Called again and again: ‘Vanessa! Vanessa! Wake up! Fire! Fire!’ He moved to the right where he thought that her room must be, but now was caught in a perfect fog of smoke. His feet struck some more stairs and he remembered that above this floor were the attics. If he could reach those he could fling open the windows, for even his mad anxiety for Vanessa was countered by his agony for breath. His lungs were choked, he could not see and, although his brain was clear, his limbs refused to obey him. At that same moment pain leapt on to him, pain moving in the centre of the smoke. An iron hand crushed his breast. The fingers pressed and pressed. He fell on to his knees. ‘A moment,’ he thought. ‘This pain will pass and I shall be able to move again.’ But it did not. The giant hand turned and turned, so that he could see his poor heart crushed, screwed round and then squeezed until the pain seemed to draw his very eyeballs down into his stomach.

His last conscious thought was of Vanessa. ‘Vanessa,’ he murmured, ‘Vanessa.’ He rolled over and lay there, prone, while the eddies of smoke—strong, careless, singing a song—rose, saluted the wind, filling every cranny.

Vanessa had been long in a dreamless sleep when she awoke to the sound of a loud banging on her door. Even as she opened her eyes Violet and Timothy rushed in, behind them a strange glare and everywhere in the air a crackling, murmuring, buzzing frenzy.

She did not need their cry: ‘Vanessa! Get up! The whole house is on fire!’

In an instant everything was visible and clear to her. She seemed in that moment of springing out of bed to have time to notice everything—the calm undisturbed paraphernalia of the bedroom, her clothes across the chair, the yellow sofa that she always thought so ugly, the long looking-glass in which were reflected Timothy and Violet, Timothy with a riding-coat over his nightshirt, Violet in a bright blue dressing-gown, and behind them that sinister glitter veiled with sudden mists. The air stank of smoke. She heard a dog bark.

Violet pulled at her arm.

‘It’s terrible! It’s terrible!’ she continued to cry. ‘The whole house is on fire!’

And Timothy, running back, called:

‘The children! The children! Get the children!’

But her own thought was at once for her father. She thought of nothing and nobody else. She put on her dressing-gown and slippers with a single gesture and ran out. She saw them flocking down the stairs—Philip, Timothy, Violet, the children. The stairs were still untouched. You seemed from the lower stairs to plunge into darkness while on the first floor the baize door was a sheet of flame and all around her the smoke rose like water, flooding forward, eddying back again. She ran down the first flight and crossed at once into her father’s room. It was empty. At that same moment she thought that through the crackle of the fire she heard a cry from above her: ‘Vanessa!’ She listened, and even as she did so saw Timothy’s head and shoulders above the lower banister.

‘Father!’ she cried. ‘He is not in his room!’

Timothy shouted back. ‘Come down! The whole place is falling down. It’s all right—everyone’s out. Yes, Adam too. He is on the lawn!’

She turned back once more into his room, saw the bed disordered, caught—without knowing what she did, obeying some blind instinct—things from the table, his Journal, a book, his gold watch; then ran out to meet in full force a towering column of smoke that rose in front of her like some genie. Gasping, her hand over her face, she ran forward, was down the stairs, through the door and, in an instant, in a wild, chill, blowing world, the wind screaming above her, voices everywhere, shouts and cries, some child’s wail, the neighing of horses, and faces white like paste in the blinding light of the fire.

She ran from figure to figure, not recognising them at all as persons, for they also seemed to be running, moving in some kind of dance through the wind.

She called again and again:

‘Father! Father! Where are you?’ She pulled at some man’s arm: ‘My father! Is he here? Have you seen him?’ and some figure that she did not know, someone holding a clock and a picture, cried, as though in an ecstasy, ‘The house! The house! The roof will be in!’

Then she ran into Leathwaite. He cried before she could speak:

‘Miss Vanessa! The master! He’s not here!’

They turned together and ran towards the house which was now all bright with flame and alive in every part, while from its heart there came a beat like a drum and above it arms of fire strained up to the ebony sky, starred with the pigeons from the loft, flying into the light as though splashed with bright water, then vanishing into darkness.

Will dashed through the door. She would have gone after him but some man’s hand held her, gripping her shoulder. ‘You mustn’t go, Miss Vanessa,’ someone shouted in her ear as though she were deaf. ‘It’s not safe——’ and then called, ‘Will! Will! Come back! Everyone’s out!’

She struggled. ‘Let me go! What do you mean? They are not all out. My father is there——’

A moment later Will’s face, strangely unreal, appeared at a window. He shouted to them.

‘He’s not here! I’m in his room!’ And then, after looking into the room again: ‘I can’t go back! The fire’s too strong!’

‘Jump!’ several voices cried, and a woman screamed. He climbed out on to the window-sill, let his legs dangle, caught his arm in something and fell.

And, at once, as things happen in dreams, inconsequent, without reason, Vanessa saw that Benjie was beside her. She heard his voice, as from an infinite distance, explaining that he had come back from Keswick that evening, been roused and at once ridden down. ‘Oh, thank God you’re safe, Vanessa,’ he said, hurried from her as figures do in dreams, was back again, his arm round her, crying, ‘It’s all right. Will’s broken a leg. No one else is harmed. Everyone’s safe.’

She tore herself away from him.

‘No, no, Benjie! Don’t you see? Father’s in there! Father’s there!’

She ran forward. He pulled her back.

‘Don’t be mad. No one can live in there! The roof is falling!’

She fought him, she struck his face.

‘Let me go! Let me go! We must find him!’

He held her with all his strength, pressing her against him. The ground was covered with people; the horses that they had taken from the stable trampled and neighed. With a great gesture, as though in a frenzy of exultation, the flames flung up their arms, the roof crashed.

The house gave up its life.