Читать книгу Early Autumn - Louis Bromfield - Страница 11

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As she left the room to follow him she stopped for a moment to say to Sybil, “Are you happy, my dear? You’re not sorry that you aren’t going back to school in Saint-Cloud?”

“No, Mama; why shouldn’t I be happy here? I love it, more than anything in the world.”

The girl thrust her hands into the pockets of her riding-coat.

“You don’t think I was wrong to send you to France to school ... away from every one here?”

Sybil laughed and looked at her mother in the frank, half-mocking way she had when she fancied she had uncovered a plot.

“Are you worrying about marrying me off? I’m only eighteen. I’ve lots of time.”

“I’m worrying because I think you’ll be so hard to please.”

Again she laughed. “That’s true. That’s why I’m going to take my time.”

“And you’re glad to have Thérèse here?”

“Of course. You know I like Thérèse awfully, Mama.”

“Very well ... run along now. I must speak to your grandfather.”

And the girl went out onto the terrace where Jack stood waiting in the sun for the trap. He always followed the sun, choosing to sit in it even in midsummer, as if he were never quite warm enough.

She was worried over Sybil. She had begun to think that perhaps Aunt Cassie was right when she said that Sybil ought to go to a boarding-school with the girls she had always known, to grow loud and noisy and awkward and play hockey and exchange silly notes with the boys in the boarding-school in the next village. Perhaps it was wrong to have sent Sybil away to a school where she would meet girls from France and England and Russia and South America ... half the countries of the world; a school where, as Aunt Cassie had said bitterly, she would be forced to associate with the “daughters of dancers and opera singers.” She knew now that Sybil hadn’t liked the ball any more than Thérèse, who had run away from it without a word of explanation. Only with Thérèse it didn’t matter so much, because the dark stubborn head was filled with all sorts of wild notions about science and painting and weird books on psychology. There was a loneliness about Thérèse and her mother, Sabine Callendar, only with them it didn’t matter. They had, too, a hardness, a sense of derision and scorn which protected them. Sybil hadn’t any such protections. Perhaps she was even wrong in having made of Sybil a lady—a lady in the old sense of the word—because there seemed to be no place for a lady in the scheme of life as it had existed at the dance the night before. It was perilous, having a lady on one’s hands, especially a lady who was certain to take life as passionately as Sybil.

She wanted the girl to be happy, without quite understanding that it was because Sybil seemed the girl she had once been herself, a very part of herself, the part which had never lived at all.

She found her father-in-law seated at his great mahogany desk in the high narrow room walled with books which was kept sacred to him, at the desk from which he managed the farm and watched over a fortune, built up bit by bit shrewdly, thriftily over three hundred years, a fortune which he had never brought himself to trust in the hands of his son. It was, in its gloomy, cold way, a pleasant room, smelling of dogs and apples and wood-smoke, and sometimes of whisky, for it was here that the old man retired when, in a kind of baffled frenzy, he drank himself to insensibility. It was here that he would sometimes sit for a day and a night, even sleeping in his leather chair, refusing to see any one save Higgins, who watched over him, and Olivia. And so it was Olivia and Higgins who alone knew the spectacle of this solitary drinking. The world and even the family knew very little of it—only the little which sometimes leaked out from the gossip of servants straying at night along the dark lanes and hedges about Durham.

He sat with his coffee and a glass of Courvoisier before him while he smoked, with an air of being lost in some profound worry, for he did not look up at once when she entered, but sat staring before him in an odd, enchanted fashion. It was not until she had taken a cigarette from the silver box and lighted it that he looked up at the sound of the striking match and, focusing the burning black eyes, said to her, “Jack seems very well to-day.”

“Yes, better than he has been in a long time.”

“Perhaps, after all, the doctors are wrong.”

Olivia sighed and said quietly, “If we had believed the doctors we should have lost him long ago.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

She poured her coffee and he murmured, “It’s about Horace Pentland I wanted to speak. He’s dead. I got the news this morning. He died in Mentone and now it’s a question whether we shall bring him home here to be buried in Durham with the rest of the family.”

Olivia was silent for a moment and then, looking up, said “What do you think? How long has it been that he has lived in Mentone?”

“It’s nearly thirty years now that I’ve been sending him money to stay there. He’s only a cousin. Still, we had the same grandfather and he’d be the first of the family in three hundred years who isn’t buried here.”

“There was Savina Pentland....”

“Yes.... But she’s buried out there, and she would have been buried here if it had been possible.”

And he made a gesture in the direction of the sea, beyond the marshes where the beautiful Savina Pentland, almost a legend now, lay, somewhere deep down in the soft white sand at the bottom of the ocean.

“Would he want to be buried here?” asked Olivia.

“He wrote and asked me ... a month or two before he died. It seemed to be on his mind. He put it in a strange way. He wrote that he wanted to come home.”

Again Olivia was thoughtful for a time. “Strange ...” she murmured presently, “when people were so cruel to him.”

The lips of the old man stiffened a little.

“It was his own fault....”

“Still ... thirty years is a long time.”

He knocked the ash from his cigar and looked at her sharply. “You mean that everything may have been forgotten by now?”

Olivia made a little gesture with her white, ringless hands. “Why not?”

“Because people don’t forget things like that ... not in our world, at any rate.”

Quietly, far back in her mind, Olivia kept trying to imagine this Horace Pentland whom she had never seen, this shadowy old man, dead now, who had been exiled for thirty years.

“You have no reason for not wanting him here among all the others?”

“No ... Horace is dead now.... It can’t matter much whether what’s left of him is buried here or in France.”

“Except, of course, that they may have been kinder to him over there.... They’re not so harsh.”

A silence fell over them, as if in some way the spirit of Horace Pentland, the sinner whose name was never spoken in the family save between Olivia and the old man, had returned and stood between them, waiting to hear what was to be done with all that remained of him on this earth. It was one of those silences which, descending upon the old house, sometimes filled Olivia with a vague uneasiness. They had a way of descending upon the household in the long evenings when all the family sat reading in the old drawing-room—as if there were figures unseen who stood watching.

“If he wanted to be buried here,” said Olivia, “I can see no reason why he should not be.”

“Cassie will object to raking up an old scandal that has been forgotten.”

“Surely that can’t matter now ... when the poor old man is dead. We can be kind to him now ... surely we can be kind to him now.”

John Pentland sighed abruptly, a curious, heart-breaking sigh that seemed to have escaped even his power of steely control; and presently he said, “I think you are right, Olivia, ... I will do as you say ... only we’ll keep it a secret between us until the time comes when it’s necessary to speak. And then ... then we’ll have a quiet funeral.”

She would have left him then save that she knew from his manner that there were other things he wanted to say. He had a way of letting you know his will without speaking. Somehow, in his presence you felt that it was impossible to leave until he had dismissed you. He still treated his own son, who was nearly fifty, as if he were a little boy.

Olivia waited, busying herself by rearranging the late lilacs which stood in a tall silver vase on the polished mahogany desk.

“They smell good,” he said abruptly. “They’re the last, aren’t they?”

“The last until next spring.”

“Next spring ...” he repeated with an air of speaking to himself. “Next spring....” And then abruptly, “The other thing was about Sabine. The nurse tells me she has discovered that Sabine is here.” He made the family gesture toward the old north wing. “She has asked to see Sabine.”

“Who told her that Sabine had returned? How could she have discovered it?”

“The nurse doesn’t know. She must have heard some one speaking the name under her window. The nurse says that people in her condition have curious ways of discovering such things ... like a sixth sense.”

“Do you want me to ask Sabine? She’d come if I asked her.”

“It would be unpleasant. Besides, I think it might do harm in some way.”

Olivia was silent for a moment. “How? She probably wouldn’t remember Sabine. When she saw her last, Sabine was a young girl.”

“She’s gotten the idea now that we’re all against her, that we’re persecuting her in some way.” He coughed and blew a cloud of smoke out of his thin-drawn lips. “It’s difficult to explain what I mean.... I mean that Sabine might encourage that feeling ... quite without meaning to, that Sabine might give her the impression that she was an ally. There’s something disturbing about Sabine.”

“Anson thinks so, too,” said Olivia softly. “He’s been talking to me about it.”

“She ought never to have come back here. It’s difficult ... what I am trying to say. Only I feel that she’s up to some mischief. I think she hates us all.”

“Not all of us....”

“Not perhaps you. You never belonged here. It’s only those of us who have always been here.”

“But she’s fond of you....”

“Her father and I were good friends. He was very like her ... disagreeable and given to speaking unpleasant truths.... He wasn’t a popular man. Perhaps that’s why she’s friendly toward me ... on account of him.”

“No, it’s more than that....”

Slowly Olivia felt herself slipping back into that state of confused enchantment which had overwhelmed her more and more often of late. It seemed that life grew more and more tenuous and complicated, more blurred and indistinct, until at times it became simply a morass of minute problems in which she found herself mired and unable to act. No one spoke directly any more. It was like living in a world of shadows. And this old man, her father-in-law, was the greatest puzzle of all, because it was impossible ever to know how much he understood of what went on about him, how much he chose to ignore in the belief that by denying its existence it would cease to exist.

Sitting there, puzzled, she began to pull a leaf from the cluster of lilacs into tiny bits.

“Sometimes,” she said, “I think Sabine is unhappy....”

“No ... not that.... She’s beyond happiness or unhappiness. There’s something hard in her and unrelenting ... as hard as a cut diamond. She’s a clever woman and a queer one. She’s one of those strange creatures that are thrown off now and then by people like us. There’s nothing else quite like them in the world. They go to strange extremes. Horace was the same ... in a different, less creditable fashion.”

Olivia looked at him suddenly, astonished by the sudden flash of penetration in the old man, one of those sudden, quick gleams which led her to believe that far down, in the depths of his soul, he was far more profound, far more intelligent, unruly and defiant of tradition than he ever allowed the world to suppose. It was always the old question. How much did he know? How much did he not know ... far back, behind the lined, severe, leathery old face? Or was it a sort of clairvoyance, not of eternal illness, like Jack’s, but of old age?

“I shall ask Sabine,” she began.

“It’s not necessary at the moment. She appears to have forgotten the matter temporarily. But she’ll remember it again and then I think it will be best to humor her, whatever comes. She may not think of it again for months ... until Sabine has gone.... I only wanted to ask you ... to consult you, Olivia. I thought you could arrange it.”

She rose and, turning to go, she heard him saying, “She might like some lilacs in her room.” He hesitated and in a flat, dead voice, added, “She used to be very fond of flowers.”

Olivia, avoiding the dark eyes, thought, “She used to be very fond of flowers.... That means forty years ago ... forty long years. Oh, my God!” But after a second she said simply, “She has taken a dislike to flowers. She fancies they take up the air and stifle her. The sight of them is very bad for her.”

“I should have known you’d already thought of it.”

For an instant the old man stood facing her with a fixed and searching expression which made her feel shy and led her to turn away from him a little; and then all at once, with an air strangely timid and frightened in a man so grim in appearance, he took her hand and kissing her on the forehead murmured, “You’re a good girl, Olivia. They’re right in what they say of you. You’re a good girl. I don’t know how I should have managed without you all these years.”

Smiling, she looked at him, and then, touching his hand affectionately, she went out without speaking again, thinking, as she had thought a thousand times, what a terrible thing it must be to have been born so inarticulate and so terrified of feeling as John Pentland. It must be, she thought, like living forever imprisoned in a shell of steel from which one might look out and see friends but never touch or know them.

From the doorway she heard a voice behind her, saying almost joyfully: “The doctors must have been wrong about Jack. You and I together, Olivia, have defeated them.”

She said, “Yes,” and smiled at him, but when she had turned away again there was in her mind a strange, almost gruesome thought.

“If only Jack lives until his grandfather is dead, the old man will die happy. If only he can be kept alive until then....”

She had a strange way of seeing things in the hard light of reality, and an unreal, lonely childhood had fostered the trait. She had been born thus, and now as a woman she found that in a way it was less a curse than a blessing. In a world which survived only by deceiving itself, she found that seeing the truth and knowing it made her strong. Here, perhaps, lay the reason why all of them had come to depend upon her. But there were times, too, when she wanted passionately to be a poor weak feminine creature, a woman who might turn to her husband and find in him some one stronger than herself. She had a curious feeling of envy for Savina Pentland, who was dead before she was born.... Savina Pentland who had been the beauty of the family, extravagant, reckless, feminine, who bought strings of pearls and was given to weeping and fainting.

But she (Olivia) had only Anson to lean upon.

After she had gone away the old man sat for a long time smoking and drinking his brandy, enveloped by a loneliness scarcely more profound than it had been a little while before when he sat talking with Olivia. It was his habit to sit thus sometimes for an hour at a time, unconscious, it seemed, of all the world about him; Olivia had come in more than once at such moments and gone away again, unwilling to shatter the enchantment by so much as a single word.

At last, when the cigar had burned to an end, he crushed out the ember with a short, fierce gesture and, rising, went out of the tall narrow room and along the corridor that led to the dark stairway in the old north wing. These steps he had climbed every day since it had become necessary to keep her in the country the year round ... every day, at the same hour, step by step his big heavy-shod boots had trod the same worn stair carpet. It was a journey begun years ago as a kind of pleasure colored by hope, which for a long time now, bereft of all hope, had become merely a monotonous dreary duty. It was like a journey of penance made by some pilgrim on his knees up endless nights of stairs.

For more than twenty years, as far back as Olivia could remember, he had been absent from the house for a night but twice, and then only on occasions of life and death. In all that time he had been twice to New York and never once to the Europe he had not seen since, as a boy, he had made the grand tour on a plan laid out by old General Curtis ... a time so remote now that it must have seemed part of another life. In all those years he had never once escaped from the world which his family found so perfect and complete and which to him must have seemed always a little cramped and inadequate. Fate and blood and circumstance, one might have said, had worn him down bit by bit until in the end he had come to worship the same gods they worshiped. Now and then he contrived to escape them for a little while by drinking himself into insensibility, but always he awakened again to find that nothing had changed, to discover that his prison was the same. And so, slowly, hope must have died.

But no one knew, even Olivia, whether he was happy or unhappy; and no one would ever really know what had happened to him, deep inside, behind the gray, leathery old face.

The world said, when it thought of him: “There never was such a devoted husband as John Pentland.”

Slowly and firmly he walked along the narrow hall to the end and there halted to knock on the white door. He always knocked, for there were times when the sight of him, entering suddenly, affected her so that she became hysterical and beyond all control.

In response to the knock, the door was opened gently and professionally by Miss Egan, an automaton of a nurse—neat, efficient, inhuman and incredibly starched, whose very smile seemed to come and go by some mechanical process, like the sounds made by squeezing a mechanical doll. Only it was impossible to imagine squeezing anything so starched and jagged as the red-faced Miss Egan. It was a smile which sprang into existence upon sight of any member of the family, a smile of false humility which said, “I know very well that you cannot do without me”—the smile of a woman well enough content to be paid three times the wages of an ordinary nurse. In three or four more years she would have enough saved to start a sanatorium of her own.

Fixing her smile, she faced the old man, saying, “She seems quite well to-day ... very quiet.”

The whole hallway had been flooded at the opening of the door by a thick and complicated odor arising from innumerable medicines that stood row upon row in the obscurity of the dark room. The old man stepped inside, closing the door quickly behind him, for she was affected by too much light. She could not bear to have a door or a window open near her; even on this bright day the drawn shades kept the room in darkness.

She had got the idea somehow that there were people outside who waited to leer at her ... hundreds of them all pressing their faces against the panes to peep into her bedroom. There were days when she could not be quieted until the window-shades were covered by thick layers of black cloth. She would not rise from her bed until nightfall lest the faces outside might see her standing there in her nightdress.

It was only when darkness had fallen that the nurse was able by means of trickery and wheedling to air the room, and so it smelled horribly of the medicines she never took, but kept ranged about her, row upon row, like the fetishes of witch-doctors. In this they humored her as they had humored her in shutting out the sunlight, because it was the only way they could keep her quiet and avoid sending her away to some place where she would have been shut behind bars. And this John Pentland would not even consider.

When he entered she was lying in the bed, her thin, frail body barely outlined beneath the bedclothes ... the mere shadow of a woman who must once have been pretty in a delicate way. But nothing remained now of the beauty save the fine modeling of the chin and nose and brow. She lay there, a queer, unreal old woman, with thin white hair, skin like parchment and a silly, vacant face as unwrinkled as that of a child. As he seated himself beside her, the empty, round blue eyes opened a little and stared at him without any sign of recognition. He took one of the thin, blue-veined hands in his, but it only lay there, lifeless, while he sat, silent and gentle, watching her.

Once he spoke, calling her wistfully by name, “Agnes”; but there was no sign of an answer, not so much as a faint flickering of the white, transparent lids.

And so for an eternity he sat thus in the thick darkness, enveloped by the sickly odor of medicines, until he was roused by a knock at the door and the sudden glare of daylight as it opened and Miss Egan, fixing her flashing and teethy smile, came in and said: “The fifteen minutes is up, Mr. Pentland.”

When the door had closed behind him he went away again, slowly, thoughtfully, down the worn stairs and out into the painfully brilliant sunlight of the bright New England spring. Crossing the green terrace, bordered with great clumps of iris and peonies and a few late tulips, he made his way to the stable-yard, where Higgins had left the red mare in charge of a Polish boy who did odd tasks about the farm. The mare, as beautiful and delicate as a fine steel spring, stood nervously pawing the gravel and tossing her handsome head. The boy, a great lout with a shock of yellow hair, stood far away from her holding the reins at arm’s length. At the sight of the two the old man laughed and said, “You mustn’t let her know you’re afraid of her, Ignaz.”

The boy gave up the reins and retired to a little distance, still watching the mare resentfully. “Well, she tried to bite me!” he said sullenly.

Quickly, with a youthful agility, John Pentland swung himself to her back ... quickly enough to keep her from sidling away from him. There was a short, fierce struggle between the rider and the horse, and in a shower of stones they sped away down the lane that led across the meadows, past the thicket of black pines and the abandoned gravel-pit, toward the house of Mrs. Soames.