Читать книгу Above the Dark Tumult: An Adventure - Hugh Walpole - Страница 5

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It will be remembered that when Sancho Panza told his master the story of the beautiful shepherdess Toralva, Don Quixote could not count the number of goats carried by the fisherman across the stream in his boat.

Quoth Sancho: ‘How many goats are got over already?’

’Nay, how the devil can I tell?’ replied Don Quixote.

’There it is!’ quoth Sancho, ‘did not I bid you keep count? On my word, the tale is at an end, and now you may go whistle for the rest.’

’Ridiculous,’ cried Don Quixote. ‘Pray thee, is there no going on with the story unless I know exactly how many goats are wafted over?’

’No, marry is there not,’ quoth Sancho, ‘for as soon as you answered that you could not tell, the rest of the story quite and clean slipped out of my head; and in troth it is a thousand pities, for it was a special one.’

’So then,’ cried Don Quixote, ‘the story’s ended?’

’Ay, marry is it,’ quoth Sancho. ‘It is no more to be fetched to life than my dead mother.’

The time has come for me too, before my story can move a step forward, to number my goats. The trouble is not so much in my numbering them as in selecting the best ones for my purpose. There are so many, and they all seem to be conveyed over in the fisherman’s boat together.

The period that I must recover is a short one—only six weeks—and the place is definite enough. I will call it Howlett Hall—a name sufficiently near to the reality—and closing my eyes can see again those dark, squat buildings, the beautiful Park running to the sea’s very edge, the Devon sea with the red cliffs, the mild lisp of the waves on the shingle in that summer weather, the cooing of the doves in the trees that were scattered on the edge of the shaven lawn, old red-faced Harry Carden calling to his dogs, all the easy, lazy social life of that wealthy carefree world before the war.

And into that easy, normal world stepped, one summer afternoon, the three figures of my drama. Looking back, it seems queer enough, although at the time it was nothing, that these three should have all come into my life on the same day, almost at the same moment—John Osmund, Leroy Pengelly—and Helen Cameron....

Pengelly was the first. I was Harry Carden’s land agent, and we were, had been for several years, the greatest friends. Had he lived it would have been another story for me. Of course he was years older than I; our relationship was almost that of father and son—dear Harry with his oaths and tempers and stubbornness and charity and secret shy kindnesses and love of women, dogs and every earthly kind of sport!

Simple! It seems impossible that there should be anyone alive in this complicated world of to-day so guileless.

Well, at about three o’clock of that hot, shimmering afternoon we walked down to the beach to see about some nets that Carden had ordered from a fisherman, saw two nets, watched for a little the sea swell lazily in over the hot dry pebbles, breaking, like the outstretching paw of a sleepy cat, across the rising ridge; then turned back through the little village.

Outside the one and only pub there was standing a man. I noticed him because I knew every soul in the village, and this was a new face to me. When we had struck up through the Park gates Harry said:

‘So Pengelly’s back again.’ He said it, I remember, in a tone that roused my interest, for he disliked so few of his fellow-beings that the grating displeasure in his voice was sufficiently remarkable. I asked who Pengelly might be. Now here I perceive the danger of melodrama. Pengelly is, I suppose, the villain of this piece, if any villain there be, although it is possibly one of the small values of this story that it contains neither villain nor hero. I should like to be fair to Pengelly, especially in consideration of later events, but, however fair one may try to be, one cannot escape his nastiness. It exuded from him always and everywhere. Harry was the most generous-minded of men, but at once, when he spoke of Pengelly, a sort of disgusting atmosphere crept about us, the air seemed to darken, the warmth of the sun to grow less kindly.

There are one or two people in the world who darken the air, not so much by anything they do as by what simply, of themselves, and possibly quite without their own fault, they are. Not that Pengelly stopped at mere existence, he was quite an active personality until—but what happened to him comes later.

Carden did not say much about Pengelly just then—only that he was the nastiest, meanest, most abject little scoundrel born of woman, that he had come to the village some five years ago, agent, he declared, for some kind of photographic firm, that he had a wife whom he bullied, that he was never seen by anyone to do any work, but simply slouched around the place. Many things were suspected of him, very little proved. Then a girl in the village had a baby of which he was supposed to be the father, his wife died suddenly, and he vanished—to the great relief of everyone. And yet the unexpected thing was, Carden added, that he had a kind of fascination for some people. Even Carden himself had felt it. He was very glib in his talk, had plenty of stories to tell, had travelled, apparently, and his conceit and self-confidence were boundless.

‘I hope he’s not come back to stay,’ said Carden, and a kind of depression fell between us. I am even fanciful enough to imagine that life was never quite the same careless, happy thing for either of us after the moment when we saw Pengelly leaning his scarecrow of a body up against the wall of the Farmer’s Boy, his hands in his pockets, and his bony, ugly head thrust forward in that snakelike, piercing way that was so characteristic of him.

That was to be, however, an eventful afternoon for me, and the second new encounter that it brought me quickly knocked the first out of my head.

When we reached the house and stretched ourselves out in chairs on the lawn with a good cool drink at our elbow, Harry told me that people were coming to tea. Borlass and his stout lady and imbecile daughter, for three—and two others.

‘John Osmund,’ said Harry, ‘and the lady who is to marry him.’

‘And who may John Osmund be?’ I asked him.

Carden told me. John Osmund was a remarkable fellow. One of those men who could do anything if he liked. But he didn’t like. And yet you couldn’t call him a slacker. He was always doing something and doing it well, but they were odd, unnecessary jobs, jobs that no one else thought of doing.

Where did he come from? Nobody knew. He said that he belonged to some Glebeshire family. Oh, yes, he was a gentleman all right. Extraordinarily handsome fellow and a giant. Must be six foot six at least, and carried himself firmly, as though he had been commanding people all his life.

Funny-tempered chap, though. You never knew what was likely to upset him—went off the rocker at the slightest thing, and when he did lose his temper it was something to see. For the rest he was as sweet as a nut, and his laugh was worth going a mile to hear. But he had odd bees in his bonnet. Couldn’t bear this democratic twaddle and yet was always palling up with the fellows out of his own class, not just talking to them, but made real friends of them and didn’t mind who saw him with them. It was crowds that he said he hated and the way that everyone cheapened everything. He called it a half-baked age, and hated it for being that, said he would like to drop bombs on half humanity and leave room for the rest to grow properly. And yet he was the kindest-hearted of men, no crank, you understand, only talked of these things when he was roused.

I asked some more questions and discovered that he had been staying for a long time at the Trout Inn at Amberthwaite, a village some five miles in the Exmouth direction. He kept a horse and looked mighty fine riding it.

And the lady? Helen Cameron? She used to come down here often with the Fosters when they rented Onsett. She was an Edinburgh girl. I must have seen her. Three years ago she was down here, but was only a bit over sixteen, had her hair down. She was nearly twenty now. An orphan, very independent, a delightful girl and fascinated by Osmund.

She had arrived on her own about a month ago, met Osmund and became at once engaged to him. The odd thing, Carden said, was that he didn’t think that she was really in love with him. There was no doubt of Osmund’s feeling for her, he was simply mad about her, but his will seemed to have overpowered hers, which was saying something, because she was one of the strongest-willed and most independent women in the world. But they were a striking pair, both so good-looking, so unlike other people, so individual and alone. I’d be interested in both of them when I saw them. I felt that I would.

I had no questions to ask about Sir Nevil Borlass and his wife. I knew him well enough—commonplace, greedy, self-satisfied, vulgar. He had inherited a fortune from his father and owned a huge place, Pecking, some ten miles distant from Howlett. He wasn’t a bad fellow, I suppose, but arrogant, greedy and stupid.

‘As a matter of fact,’ said Carden, ‘I’m sorry I’ve asked them at the same time as Osmund. Osmund hates them both like poison, and he’s no swell at hiding his feelings. You may have the luck to see him in one of his tempers. It’s worth seeing.’

I did, as it happened, have that luck, and I’m never likely to forget it.

Osmund and his lady walked over from Amberthwaite.

When I saw them standing together on the sun-drenched lawn it was all I could do to restrain an exclamation. There are some people in the world—a few—like that, made, it seems, of different clay from the rest of us.

Osmund would have excited attention anywhere. His height did not seem excessive because he carried himself so magnificently. When I knew him better it was always a trick he had of throwing his head back, a gesture of freedom, of strength, of independence, quite impossible to give any real sense of, that seemed especially his. He was dark and with just that amount of foreignness in his colour that our Celts often have. You would have known him for an Englishman anywhere, though. His smile was delightful, boyish and discerning. His anger—well, I shall have an opportunity of describing that in a moment.

And Helen? If this story has neither hero nor villain, at least it has a heroine. How shall I describe her as she was on that first day? I can remember very little of that first impression. She was slim, tall, dark-haired like Osmund, and I fancy that on that first afternoon I thought her sullen, conceited, fond of her own opinion, a little arrogant.

To tell the truth, I was, I think, on that day so deeply struck by Osmund that I paid little attention to Helen. She certainly paid none at all to me. She had, as I was to learn afterwards, other things just then to think about.

We all sat down together and were very happy. How charming Osmund could be when he liked! He was the most perfectly natural being I have ever known. When he was at his ease and trusted his company he was like a cheery happy-go-lucky boy who hadn’t a bother in the world.

At any rate that was what he was on this first meeting—before all his trouble came.

I don’t think that any of us heard Fate mutter in our ears as the Borlass family appeared on the horizon, ‘Here’s the end of your happiness.’ No, we didn’t hear, but if we had we should have heard the truth.

A more commonplace trio you couldn’t have found in all England: Borlass with his thick neck and swelling stomach, and stout calves ridiculous in their rough pinky-brown stockings; Lady Borlass, a stout little woman who walked like a chicken looking for seed. She was always overdressed and, for so small a woman, wore an astonishing amount of jewels. She was famous for her jewels. Her daughter was a large lumpy girl with spectacles and a deep bass voice. She laughed like a man too, and seemed to take the deepest interest in everything that you said. Only her eyes betrayed her, for they stared through their glasses with a blank vacancy which showed that she never listened to a word that anyone uttered. It was her obsession (and also the obsession of her parents) that every male and every mother of every male pursued her for her money.

As a matter of fact, it’s my opinion that no one pursued her at all and that she was cross and lonely, poor thing.

In any case, here they were, Lady Borlass picking her way between her two large companions, who marched one on either side of her as though they were protecting her from rape and battery. She carried in her hand a lorgnette, and every once and again she would stop for a moment and examine the ground exactly like a hen looking for seed.

I have taken some while in describing this family because of its importance in what happened afterwards. The important event on this particular afternoon will take no time at all to describe.

I remember, as though it were yesterday, the immediate change in Osmund as the Borlasses appeared.

To say that it was childish inadequately describes it. His face that had a second before been open, jolly and most handsomely engaging was suddenly rebellious, ill-tempered and petulant. We all know people who are simply unable to behave decently in company that is uncongenial to them, and, however charming they may be, we do on the whole avoid them because of the awkward situations that crop up in their society—so it was now with Osmund. Harry, Helen Cameron and myself were at once uncomfortable. It was as though we had taken out into grown-up company a child who might at any moment behave indecently. Only the Borlasses noticed nothing. They patronized us all, ate their cucumber sandwiches with complete satisfaction, behaved as though they had bought all the world for a song.

The crash came, as unexpectedly for them as though a naked Pan had broken suddenly through the thicket. The affair had upon Lady Borlass just that effect. She had been speaking of her maidservants; she had a high-pitched, immensely superior voice, cold, like a lump of ice falling into a drink, cultivated, I’ve no doubt, in the early days when her own family was not quite so ‘county’ as it might have been. She talked of her servants as though they were a party of savages that had been brought over to England for her from Central Africa. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘one expects stupidity, but such idiocy ...’

Osmund jumped to his feet. The whole of his six foot six hung over us.

‘Idiocy! Idiocy!’ he cried. ‘If that isn’t just characteristic of all of you! Because you’ve got money to spend you think that you’re better than the men and women worth a thousand of you. I bet you’re as useless a woman as exists. You and your husband just cumber the ground, and it would be better for everyone if you were under it. I haven’t been here for months without knowing something about you—with your conceit and laziness and ignorance.... Oh, damn! I beg your pardon, Carden. I’ve behaved like a swine. Sorry. I’ll be going....’

It was that or something like that. I only know that after all these years the anger and impatience and lack of control of that outbreak have for me still the effect as though the sky had cracked asunder and a bolt, black and thunderous, crashed to our feet!

Anyway, Osmund went there and then, without another word to any of us, strode furiously across the lawn and was gone. The tea-party, needless to say, was ended. I can see yet the look of staggered surprise in the Borlass countenances, as though a damp rag had been pressed there and wiped all the modelling away. Helen Cameron said not a word.

Next day I met Osmund by the seashore. Shamefaced, he confessed his sins. He had behaved, he supposed, like a perfect cad? I said that he had. Was Carden furious? Yes, Carden was furious. He’d better go up, he supposed, and take his licking. He liked Carden. He’d take any beating he wanted to give him. I suggested that he should write a note of apology to Lady Borlass. But that he wouldn’t hear of. He had, he considered, committed no crime at all so far as the Borlasses were concerned. He’d been wanting to say something to them ages back; it was only saying it in Harry Carden’s garden that was wrong, under old Harry’s roof, so to speak, and in front of myself and Miss Cameron.

But there it was. He had the devil of a temper; he had always had one and never learnt to control it as a kid. People like the Borlasses made him feel sick. But he apologized to me, and would perfectly understand if I never wanted to speak to him again.

I liked him. I couldn’t help but like him. You’d have liked him had you known him at that time.

He took then a surprising fancy to myself, and in a short while we were seeing one another very often. Three things I noticed about him. One was that, charming, kindly, humorous as he mostly was, these sudden winds of passion were at any time liable to ruffle his spirit. Secondly, that he was a poet with a real worship of beauty in every possible form—nature, art, music, letters, character, everything—and that, just now, this love of beauty was all directed into the channel of his worship for Helen Cameron. Thirdly, that, as Carden said, he made the oddest intimacies with men quite outside his own class and education.

Not many days passed before I met such a friend, Charlie Buller by name. Buller was short, sturdy, with a certain air of hostler about him. He was a jolly little man, with pleasant wrinkles about his eyes and an apple-brown complexion. He had no especial purpose in life that I could see except to joke about everything. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised at his having done time. He was as reticent about his past as his present—altogether not at all the sort of friend for Osmund. But then Osmund, gentleman as he was, was most certainly adventurous also. No one knew anything at all about his past. Helen Cameron herself had no idea whether he had relations, whether he had been in the Army, whether he had any means.

She was hypnotized by him as, to a certain degree, I was myself.

Then an awful thing happened. I fell in love with Helen Cameron. How often in the years that followed I looked back and asked myself whether I could have done anything, anything at all, to have prevented this. Now I know that I could not. It was one of the strands—and not the least important one either—in the strange plot in which we were all at last to figure.

At the time it was madness and worse. I was Osmund’s friend, for one thing; for another, I didn’t want just then to fall in love with anyone; for a third, I had no reason to think that she had any interest in me: if she thought of me at all, she seemed to dislike me. But it happened—as inevitably and, it seemed, as hopelessly as all the rest of this incredible business.

And, what is more, I knew the exact moment when it happened.

I had walked with Osmund and Helen to the Park gate. As we reached it the rain began. All the trees above our heads trembled; there were the secret urgent whispers of a coming storm. He drew her under the cover of his waterproof, but just before they turned down the windy road, meeting the rain, she looked back and smiled.

I stood there looking after her, looking beyond her into an angry tear of yellow sky that slashed the thick gray. I knew in that moment that I loved her. I hoped at first that it was a passing fever, caught from the quietness and remoteness of our life in this little place. I left next morning for London. I returned a week later, knowing that this was something far different from any love affair of my life. Yes, and by God, so it has been!

I returned to find one or two odd things. One was that Osmund’s friend, Charlie Buller, had someone lodging with him, a big flabby balloon-like man with a remarkably small head. His name was Hench. He had a funny squeaky voice like a woman’s, but he seemed not a bad fellow, from Osmund’s account of him, kindly, ready to do anything for anyone. All the same, they were, both of them, strange friends for Osmund to have. And then I discovered a queerer thing yet. They were both of them, Buller and Hench, hand in glove with the horrible Pengelly. I saw the three of them constantly together, and, stranger yet, Osmund, it seemed, on passable terms with Pengelly. I spoke to Carden about this. He only shrugged his shoulders. Since that scandalous outburst he had seen very little of Osmund. A fellow who behaved like that to your guests—well, it made a chap uncomfortable....

Then things moved quickly. Looking back now, I feel that I was in a kind of dream during those weeks, and not a very pleasant dream either. Now that I had fallen in love with Helen, I perceived in her every kind of sweetness, nobility and charm. But I had to behave decently. I avoided her persistently. Everyone thought that I disliked her—Carden, Osmund, and Helen herself. I think that it was this sense of my dislike of her that first stirred her interest in me. And she wasn’t—although at the time I had no idea of this—at all happy: frightened, uneasy, desperately apprehensive. The more she knew of Osmund the more apprehensive she became.

Even I could see, during those weeks, what a queer fellow he was. Madness does not cover it, neither then nor later. I shall not attempt any analysis of him. At the moment I am concerned only with events; but at least from the very first I realized that Osmund was, so to speak, ‘out-size’—not only in physical things, but especially in spiritual. He had—he must always have had—a sort of wild impatience with life. Things that he read in the paper—little casual wayside things—made him mad with irritation. He wanted to ‘get at’ people and punish or praise or comfort or expose. He hated injustice and cruelty and meanness with a ferocity that I’ve never seen equalled in any other human being, but he was himself, in that very hatred, unjust and cruel—mean never.

He really believed, I think, that, were he given a free, omnipotent hand, he would by wholesale executions and wholesale rewards set all the world right. And yet he was not conceited, did not believe in his own powers. I think that it was partly his sense of his own weakness and ignorance that exasperated him.

And beside Osmund and Helen stood Pengelly. Even at that time, before anything had happened, I realized by a kind of spiritual sniffing of the air that Pengelly was mixed up with all of this. I cannot possibly describe the way in which he was forever turning up. He wore a thin, gray Aquascutum that flapped about his bony legs and, cocked sideways, a bowler too large for him that badly needed brushing. He had a thin cane, with which he used to tap his teeth.

He had nothing to do with any of us, and yet he was always appearing round the corner. He would grin, touch his shabby bowler, look at us as though he had something very important to say and slouch away.

I remember saying to Osmund that I wondered that Charlie Buller made a friend of him. Buller seemed a decent little chap.

‘Oh, it isn’t Charlie that’s Pengelly’s friend,’ said Osmund, ‘it’s Hench.’

And Hench? What was he doing here? Like Buller and Pengelly, nothing at all apparently, slouching about like a bladder that needed pricking, a really comic figure, with that little mild face staring above the big wobbly body. And his voice, whenever I heard it, made me want to giggle like a schoolgirl.

What were they doing? We very soon knew. The climax crashed in upon us as though a gray muddy sky had swamped down and choked us.

I heard it from Carden.

One remembers the most ridiculous details of sudden catastrophic scenes that, with a swing and a push, hammer one’s life into a new direction. So, on that sunny morning in Carden’s library, I was hammered.

I was, I remember, at that moment trying to write. I have all my life been trying to write in the odd moments between what is, I believe, of vastly more importance, trying to live. Just then I was fancying that I could produce a pretty combination of nature and fiction: you know the sort of thing—beavers and otters, cranky heroes who think they should redeem the world, and beautiful trusting young girls. The happy combination has never been brought off yet, and I am most certainly not clever enough to manage it.

I had just written a most moving little description of the Otter’s life as, pursued by cruel hunters, he was nosing for his three wives everywhere, when Carden came in, his round childish eyes simply popping in his face.

He gasped. He sat down, stuttered as though he would have a fit, then told me. Last night, half an hour after midnight, Osmund, with Buller and Hench in attendance, was arrested in the hall of the Borlass mansion on the charge of attempted burglary.

‘Oh, rot!’ I shouted, jumping up. ‘Osmund ... Burglary ... Absurd, impossible!’—and so on.

But it was true, deadly true. Buller and Hench had had masks and lanterns, all the regular paraphernalia.

Osmund had not uttered one word when arrested, simply shrugged his shoulders.

In due time more of the mystery was declared. They had been given away, the three of them. Everything was known to the police long before the attempt. The police, gathered in from Exmouth, were simply waiting for them.

Further than that, it appeared that their betrayer was Pengelly.

Charlie Buller had been, it appeared, the originator of the plan. He had heard of Lady Borlass’s jewels, had persuaded an old friend of his, Hench, to come in with him, and there they were. How Pengelly wormed himself into their confidence nobody knew. Why he played the part he did nobody knew either.

He betrayed them from the very first.

But, mystery of mysteries, what had Osmund to do in this galère? Osmund, the aristocrat, to be mixed in this degraded crowd, and involved in a burglary as common and vulgar as any in the cheapest novelette!

Not at his arrest, nor at his trial nor afterwards, did he utter a single word. He went to jail as quietly as he went fishing.

As you may suppose, my first and my last thought was of Helen. What she must be suffering in her love, her pride, her affronted privacy, her sudden loneliness! But was it not human nature that behind this sorrow for her I should, in spite of myself, wonder whether there was not now a chance for me? I might have known her better.

I saw her indeed only once. On a wild stormy afternoon I was battling my way home across the beach, and I almost ran into her. We stepped back into some shelter of a rock.

I asked her: ‘Is there a thing I can do?’

‘Nothing,’ she answered me.

Then, holding out her hand to me and smiling, she said: ‘He won’t tell me why he did it. He’ll tell me nothing. I think it was a prank of his at the last minute, to play a game on the Borlasses. I don’t know. We shall marry as soon as he comes out.’

Then, looking at me as I’d never seen her look at me, she said: ‘I want you to promise one thing.’

‘I’ll promise anything,’ I answered.

‘Don’t try to see me again. Forget us both. I like life to be difficult, but I don’t want it to be too difficult. If you really wish to help me, promise me that.’ And she was gone.

She left me in a state of exaltation, defiance, exasperation. Did she care for me after all? And if she did, wouldn’t I fight heaven and earth to have her?

I argued basely with myself that Osmund was my friend no longer, that in any case he could now only make her miserable, that for her sake I must prevent her from what could only be a wretched marriage. I wrote her, again and again, mad, passionate, pleading letters. I received no answer. I could get no news of her. With 1914 came the war and the end of every story.

I had one more glimpse, however, of the villain of this little piece.

In 1915 I was home on leave and, the loneliest soul in the world, sought out the only friend I had. I sent a wire to Carden and followed it down to find the house shut up and Carden in France. I wandered, on a wet, dreary evening, about the gardens already growing wild with neglect, hating the blind, hostile, shuttered windows and the sough of the wind in the trees.

A stormy shivering moon broke out from the clouds and palely lit the lawn, that very lawn upon which, under a blazing sun, Osmund and Helen and I had first met.

As I stood there someone stepped crunchingly on the gravel path before the shuttered windows. I turned, and there was Pengelly. Oh, but unmistakable, his dusty bowler cocked sideways, his Aquascutum flapping at his heels.

He stood there, staring, as though he, too, had seen a ghost. I called his name, ‘Pengelly, you dirty swine!’ He turned and ran, I followed, but the moon was veiled, the rain came beating down, hammering on the shuttered boards, there was no other sound in the world.

He became, after that, an obsession with me. I was always looking for him. When I saw him I would discover where the Osmunds were and then wring his dirty neck.

But the world is a large place. As I have already told you, I went from one miserable job to another, always the image of Helen haunting me, loving only her, not knowing whether she were alive or dead—wanting her ... wanting her....

And now you know why the sight of Pengelly’s hatchet face in that barber’s shop was the most momentous vision in the world!