Читать книгу Mrs. Parkington - Louis Bromfield - Страница 4

Table of Contents

Each morning she stood by the window packing lunches as the sun came up behind the mountains. The spectacle began with the rosy light striking the great peak on the far side of the flat green valley long before the sun, hidden by the mountains, was itself visible. A river of clear water ran down the center of the valley, shallow and clean, wandering this way and that lazily in the sunshine of the dry season. Willows and cottonwoods and sedge grass, haunted by wild birds, grew along its flanks, and all the year round, even when there was no rain, the trees stayed green and brilliant against the yellow burnt grass of the valley and the red of the mountains across the wide valley from the boardinghouse.

For it was really a boardinghouse and not a hotel for all its high-sounding name, and it stood opposite the Wilder Gap Saloon on the long single street of Leaping Rock with its back turned toward the peak so that Susie, working in the kitchen, could look across the valley. At seventeen she did not understand why the view from the kitchen window made her heart sing. It was vast and free and open, so vast that the invasion of man could never alter nor wholly subdue its beauty, so filled with splendor that there were moments when it seemed to her a valley out of paradise. And as the day wore on, and the sun swung through the arc of heaven, it remained not one valley; it became many valleys, changing as the light altered, quivering at noon in an iridescent mirage of heat, deepening into cool rich purple as the night fell.

There was the early morning when all the gaudy, rough street of Leaping Rock, lined with brothels and saloons and gambling establishments, lay in a cool blue shadow while the rest of the valley warmed slowly to the pink glow of the sunrise. Then there was noon when all the valley was flooded with hot, clear, light which made the feathery leaves of the pepper trees in the dirty yard outside the window hang limply and the pale willows and the shining cottonwoods lining the river bed danced and swayed in the heat. And there was the afternoon, just before sunset, when the blue shadow of the great mountain crept across the flat land slowly, gently, inevitably, bathing the whole landscape in a blue dusk which at last engulfed Leaping Rock itself as the miners returned and the oil lights began to glow in the brothels and saloons and overhead the sky turned from red to flamingo pink to the blue of azure and at last to the deep blue of velvet and the stars came out like diamonds. The nights were best of all—the clear, dry cool nights when the air was like the champagne sold in the Opera House bar and the great vastness of the mountains melted away into darkness and there was only space and emptiness and a sense of freedom and an ecstasy of the spirit.

Susie always saw the sunrise because she and her mother got out of bed in the darkness to prepare the lunches for the men going off to the mines. While the pink light increased and the mountain walls emerged again from the darkness like a transparency at the Opera House, Susie and her mother packed the sandwiches and poured the coffee into containers. Her mother Was a spare and active woman rather like a beautiful whippet with small blue eyes and a dimpled mouth and a twinkle. She was one of those women who worked hard through some fierce inner compulsion. Life without physical action, without hard work would have been intolerable to her, and in Susie’s spare trim figure there was something of the same passionate restlessness and desperate need for activity. But in Susie these things were tempered by a romantic feeling which at moments seemed to hypnotize her into a kind of dreaming peace.

The Grand Hotel was the best establishment of its kind in the whole bawdy town. Its rooms and linen, kept by Chinese servants, were clean and fresh and cool. Its food was plain but good, and about the parlor and even the little drinking and smoking room there was an air of home, born out of the spirit of Susie’s mother, who would, if it had been possible, have mothered the whole world.

From her mother Susie got her fineness of bone and the fineness of feature and the elusive look of race, and from her too Susie got the shrewdness and that curious objectivity which protected and carried her through all the shocks and tragedies of her life. It gave her the power to stand aside watching herself in the very midst of calamity, as if at times she were two persons, one herself and the other a kind of narrator in a Greek tragedy. People said sometimes that she was hardhearted and unfeeling, and toward the end of her life they sometimes said that only a hardhearted woman could have survived the tragedies which happened to her. But it was only that people did not understand. It was this quality, inherited from her mother and the product of her mother’s stern training, which stood by her on the morning the whole life of Leaping Rock and the valley was shattered by catastrophe.

From her father, Susie reflected long afterward, she had gained nothing save perhaps the good humor and calmness of disposition which her mother had never known. Her mother fidgeted and worried and because of this the Grand Hotel was the best establishment in Leaping Rock. Her father never worried at all, and so everyone loved him although he never amounted to much and his family would have had hard going indeed but for his wife. Susie loved her father and she only respected her mother.

The knowledge of this curious fact troubled and sometimes distressed her as she stood at the window of the kitchen looking across the enchanted valley. It troubled her again and again through her long life—that so many people she respected she could not love at all and so many people she loved were not worth her respect.

That was one of the things which made her think a great deal about Augustus Parkington. She respected him and in a way she loved him, not the way of course in which she loved her father. At seventeen she was beginning to find out the different ways in which you could love people. Certainly they were not all alike. Her father she loved because he was gentle and humorous and never worried. Sometimes she thought she loved him because he was so utterly different from her mother who did everything well and thoroughly, who worried all day long and was never still from the time she rose as the dawn came up over the valley until the lights began to go out in the saloons and gambling houses along Nevada Street. Her father worked. He had a kind of job checking the men in and out of the mines; but he did not allow it to trouble him. He had no desire to become superintendent of the works or to go out prospecting in the hope of making a sudden great fortune like Augustus Parkington. He was simply content to sit in his little cage, smiling and swapping stories with the men as they went in and out, just as he liked sitting on the front porch of the Grand Hotel entertaining the guests. They, like Susie herself, always felt better at the sight of him, a big, rather soft man, with a twinkle in his gray eyes when he returned from the mines in the evening.

Augustus Parkington was very different. In the first place he came from the East, from New York, and he was what Susie’s mother called “a flashy dresser.” Even when he went up to the mines he wore his best clothes with shoes carefully polished by Sam Young, the Chinese boy, wearing the finest silk shirt with a purple cravat fastened with a diamond pin and a heavy gold watch chain across his checkered waistcoat. He wore a big diamond on the little finger. The only man Susie had ever seen who dressed nearly so richly was Aristides Vedder, the gambler, who made the circuit of Leadville, Virginia City and Leaping Rock over and over again many times a year. But of course the fine clothes worn by Aristides Vedder did not make the same effect as when worn by Augustus.

When Susie wasn’t careful she found herself thinking of him as “Augustus” although she had no right to any such familiarity. He was, after all, a middle-aged man, thirty-three on his next birthday, and he was important. He owned half of the great Juno Mine which kept on and on pouring silver down the side of the great mountain on the opposite side of the valley. And people said he owned railroads in the East and was a big stock operator. They said he was a millionaire and that he didn’t know how rich he was and didn’t care, that he wasn’t interested in money but in the making of it.

Susie didn’t know much about the East so the stories about him had no very great reality. To her all the stories had a little the fantastic quality of the Thousand and One Nights. She had never been east of Denver and the East seemed a foreign country and New York a place filled with big restaurants and bright lights and beautiful women and rich men. While she worked about the kitchen with her mother, she thought a great deal about it and how she must some day go there, for Susie inside her small, trim body had bursting ambition. That was what made her resemble her mother rather than her father. Sometimes at night she couldn’t sleep because the ambitions kept churning and rumbling about inside her, as if she had bad indigestion.

And the beauty of the rich valley didn’t help her to stifle the yearnings. It was grand and splendrous, she was aware, but she also knew that it was barren. Leaping Rock held no future for herself. As she grew older she began to understand what it was that made her mother so restless and miserable and busy, so that all day long until late at night she hurried from one thing to another, making work for herself where before there had been none. All day, all night, until she fell asleep her mother was running away from something, and presently Susie understood what it was.

The discovery came to her one day in the very middle of the morning. Surprisingly, in the very middle of their work while they were dusting the parlor, her mother sat down abruptly and said, “Susie, there’s something I must say to you.”

And Susie was frightened, because her mother had never before done anything like this. She lived perpetually shut in, behind a kind of wall which came between herself and Susie. And now Susie was aware with the sharp and puzzled instinct of an adolescent girl that the wall was down, that for the first time her mother meant to talk of what went on deep inside her behind that wall. She sat down on the edge of the horsehair sofa, her toes pointing in, filled with shyness. At first she thought her mother was going to tell her that she had some fatal malady and was about to die.

But it wasn’t that. Her mother clasped her thin, hard hands together and said abruptly, “When you’re eighteen, Susie, I’m going to send you away.”

As if it cost her a great effort she said nothing more until Susie murmured, “Yes, Ma. Where?”

“To the East, Susie ... to your Great Aunt Sapphira in Vermont.”

And again Susie was frightened. She had never seen her Great Aunt Sapphira but she knew that her father always spoke of Sapphira as the family witch. Susie didn’t even know then whether she wanted to go to Vermont. It was the East but not the East she had dreamed of. And she loved the valley. It was the valley and the great mountain she knew she would miss most of all ... more even than her father.

But her mother was going on. “I want you to have things in life which I’ve never had, Susie. I wanted a great many things—power and satisfaction and money and diamonds....” Her eyes flashed suddenly and she spoke with firmness, almost with shame, “Yes, diamonds and power. When I was your age I wanted to be somebody in the world, I thought it was going to be like that when I married your father, but it wasn’t.” She sighed and said, “Your father is a good man. He’s never caused me any trouble or any unhappiness, but it just wasn’t in him, I guess. He didn’t want the things I wanted. They didn’t signify. He didn’t value them. I could have got them in my own way once—a woman’s way—but I didn’t and I don’t regret it now ... only sometimes. I want you to have all those things, Susie, that I didn’t have. I want you to live nice and in a civilized world, not a place like Leaping Rock. There’s nothing here for you. You’re mighty pretty and it would be a shame if you were just to settle down and work and get hands like mine.”

She watched Susie sitting on the edge of the sofa. When she had finished Susie didn’t say anything and her mother said, “Don’t you want those things, Susie?”

After a moment the girl said, “Yes, maybe. I don’t know. Only I don’t like leaving you and Pa ... and the valley.”

She was only fourteen then and the things her mother talked about didn’t mean much to her. Suddenly her mother stood up and resumed her dusting now, furiously as if she hated the prim shabby sofas and chairs. Then she said, “We’ll never speak of it again.”

They never did speak of it again, but as Susie grew older she began to understand about the things her mother talked of. The understanding came slowly, out of books and because the germs of the same ambition which tortured her defeated mother were there inside her own breast. But most of all, it was Augustus Parkington who made her understand. When he talked to her about the East and the great world outside the valley, in the purple evenings after the sun had disappeared behind the great mountain, the fabulous world of the East became alive and real, perhaps because he loved it so much or perhaps because his own immense vitality and enthusiasm swept you with him, as flood-water rushing down El Dorado Canyon in the spring carried everything before it. In Topeka and Chicago they said Augustus Parkington could sell a whore-house to a Baptist preacher.

He would sit there on the front porch of the Grand Hotel, big and handsome in his fine clothes and jewelry, talking in his rich deep voice—a voice which embraced and seduced you, man or woman, young or old—and presently you were completely under his spell and fearful that he would stop talking and go away, because after he had gone the world about you for a long time afterward seemed a tired and empty place.

He liked Susie and he nearly always treated her like a little girl, even when she had turned seventeen and her figure filled out the calico dresses her mother made for her. But there were moments when Susie knew that something different had come into the relationship between them. It was something she did not understand and so it alarmed and at the same time excited her. Because she was intensely feminine she became aware as she grew older of the maleness of Major Parkington. His mere presence, on those yearly visits, made the whole hotel seem a more exciting place. She had, once or twice, overheard conversations in which people talked about Major Parkington and the way he had with women, but this did not mean much to her. She knew nothing about love at all and even less about sex, and the idea of marrying a man as old as Augustus Parkington was preposterous. A girl of seventeen marrying an old man of thirty-three! She only hoped that somehow, somewhere, some time she would meet a suitor her own age who was half as fine as the Major. Sometimes she wondered how he could be interested in talking to anyone so young and insignificant as herself.

It was only long afterward that she came to understand what he was doing on those evenings. She understood after she came to know him and his way with women. He had spent those hours talking to her because he could not help himself, because always in the big handsome body and mind was the urge to woo and seduce this young girl who was so simple and straightforward and lacking in feminine tricks. Her very lack of coquetry, her very simplicity at once defeated him and enticed him. And always at the back of his character was that disconcerting charm and niceness which kept him from carrying through so base a desire as the seduction of a nice girl and the daughter of so respectable and worthy a woman as the proprietress of the Grand Hotel. He was always like that, during all his life; at the very moment when you were prepared and reconciled forever to dismissing him as an unmitigated scoundrel he did something utterly disarming and generous and nice which confounded you and you found yourself in the position of beginning all over again.

Long afterward she understood what he was doing when he “wasted” his time talking to her. He was wooing her, making love to her, caressing her without once speaking of love or even touching her. He did it with his voice, his clear blue eyes, his manner. It was as if there were an aura about him which reached out and enveloped you, filling you with strange half-realized thoughts and desires.

A dozen times during the evening the face of her mother would appear in the window behind them and then disappear again like a ghost. And again it was only long afterward, years after her mother’s death, that Susie understood what was in her mother’s mind. She was thinking: If he wants her he must marry her. He could give her everything and Susie is smart enough to profit by what he can give her. But he will never marry her. She would be of help to him in what he wants from the world, but he isn’t clever enough to understand that.

And so her mother kept watch, returning again and again to the window. Major Parkington was her mother’s best boarder. If Susie could keep him at the Grand Hotel on his visits to Leaping Rock, it was all right so long as there was no monkey business. But he must never so much as touch her....

It might never have happened but for the explosion. Long afterward Susie learned that many great things, many sweeping currents changing the whole of one’s life came of isolated, sometimes small happenings, apparently unrelated to the events surrounding them.

On the morning of the explosion she was alone in the big kitchen peeling potatoes and watching the wide valley. Now and then a wagon or a man on horseback appeared on the thin ribbon of a road which ran from the town of Leaping Rock straight across to the great mountain where the mines were. It was a hot morning and at moments the waves of heat rising from the sandy floor of the valley would appear to lift the lone horseman or wagon from the road high into the air and turn him upside down. Then a sudden gust of wind would flatten the glittering tongues of heat and the horseman would appear again right side up on the road, moving toward the thread of river bordered by cottonwood trees. Presently the purple which veiled the bottom of the great mountain at sunrise was gone and with it the deep rose light that painted the very top, and then the whole mountain stood suddenly revealed in the blistering heat of midday, naked and bare and ugly, a terrifying mass of rock streaked with copper and silver. Up there on the face of the mountain, in the small cleft which looked as if it had been made by the tomahawk of some great Indian god, was the mine. Up there among the myriads of ants who were the Chinese and Irish who worked the mine, were her father sitting in his cage, telling stories, and her mother who had crossed the valley in the buckboard a little after sunrise to take food to her father and Major Augustus Parkington. They had stayed the night rather than cross the wide valley after dark.

Susie had finished the potatoes and was emptying the peelings into the slop bucket for the pigs when it occurred. As she straightened her body to close the door she saw, high up in the cleft, a sudden vast flower of smoke. At first it was like a ball of the cotton which they were trying to grow in the wide flat valley. Then slowly in the hot air it began to spread and at the same time the sound of the explosion entered the town. The windows rattled with the impact and Susie felt herself thrown against the door and then from along the single street bordered by brothels and gambling houses and stores there came the confused sound of many frightened people. There were screams and shouts and the firing of guns and the brayings of donkeys and the neighing of horses all mingled together.

She thought dully: They are up there, Ma and Pa and the Major. They’ve all been killed. For it seemed to her as the smoke rose and spread like the opening of a gigantic flower, that no one in that narrow cleft could be alive.

And almost at once in the narrow straight road there appeared a hurrying procession of figures, some on horses, some on donkeys, some in buckboards and still others on foot, running. They were coming out from the town, crossing the valley toward the great mountain.

For a moment, standing there by the door, she felt a wild impulse to join the mob, and then a quiet voice deep inside her, the voice which was to speak to her again and again during her long life, said, “There is no use in your going. There is nothing you can do. You will be more useful here if you are calm and go about your work. They will be coming back after a time. They will want bandages and hot water and beds and food.”

And so she went back again into the house and set to work preparing all the things which might be needed. She thought: Perhaps Ma and Pa and the Major are dead or maybe they are only hurt. All I can do now is to pray for them and work.

And as she worked she fought back both tears and terror. Her hands shook so that it was difficult for her to tear the old sheets into strips for bandages, and presently two of the harlots from Mrs. LaVerne’s establishment came in, lost and terrified. They helped with the work and after that she felt better.

Presently from the cleft in the mountain on the opposite side of the valley, figures small as ants began to trickle down toward the valley and late in the afternoon, the first of the wounded and dying began to cross the hot valley, some walking, some on donkey back and some in carts. But still there was no message or any news.

As she worked, Susie and the harlots sometimes talked and sometimes were silent but never did they speak of the mine or the disaster except to say now and then, “Some one will be coming soon.”

And Susie who had never spoken to such women before, divined that they were human. She learned that one of them was called Belle Slocomb and was born in Providence, Rhode Island. The other was a German girl called Minnie Oberland who came from Cincinnati. She was a little frightened at the prospect of her mother’s returning to find the two girls in the hotel. Probably her mother would call them evil names and send them out of the house—that is, if she were not already dead.... But Susie on her own felt no special horror or strangeness about the two girls. They seemed a little loud and the color in their cheeks a little violent and Minnie Oberland’s gold teeth a little strange and unnatural, but otherwise they were not much different from all the women she knew. They were not at all what she had expected women like them to be; smoke did not pour from their nostrils and they did not have tails. Minnie cried a good deal; it seemed that she was in love with one of the men who worked up there in the cleft of the great mountain. The one called Belle Slocomb did not cry, although her eyes at times seemed to glisten with an unnatural brightness. She said she had been in love once and that was enough and that she was finished with everything of that sort.

Then at the hour when the mountain, falling into the shadow cast by the setting sun seemed to sink down into a haze of blue shadow, Susie heard, during one of the silences that fell upon them, the sound of footsteps on the porch—a heavy man’s foot-step which in a moment she recognized. It was Major Parkington. It was odd that her heart should tell her who it was before his own big figure appeared in the doorway.

He had his arm in a sling and his wavy black hair was clotted with blood and his handsome face was streaked with dust. At sight of him one of the harlots—Belle Slocomb—said, “Just what happened, Gus?” She seemed, Susie thought, to know him very well.

He sat down heavily on the sofa as if he no longer had the strength to walk or to stand and the two harlots bent over him. Susie stood very still watching him. She wanted to do what the harlots had done. She wanted to touch him, to push the curly black hair back from his eyes; but it was as if she were paralyzed and could not move. He looked at her and when his blue eyes met hers she knew that her father and mother were dead.

He said to the harlots, “Go away, girls. I want to speak to Susie alone.”

As if they understood what had happened, Belle said, “All right, Gus.” Then she looked at Susie and crossed the room and putting her arms about her, kissed her. She didn’t say anything, but turning away she put her arm about the shoulder of the German girl from Cincinnati and led her out of the room.

Then the Major looked again at Susie and Susie said, “Both?”

“Both.”

Susie did not cry. No tears would come now, perhaps because she had known somehow from the moment of the explosion what he was telling her now. She had had moments like that before, moments of curious clairvoyance, and she was to have many more of them again and again at odd moments of crisis in her life.

She felt suddenly faint and would have fallen but for the Major’s arm which slipped quickly around her small waist. It was a strong arm; they said in Leaping Rock that he was stronger than any of the miners.

When she opened her eyes she was lying on the sofa. The Major was sitting beside her and the two harlots, their faces soft now with sympathy, were near, the one holding a basin of water and the other an empty brandy glass.

The blonde one asked, “Are you all right now, honey?”

“I’m all right,” Susie managed to say.

Then the Major said again, “Go away, girls. If I want you I’ll call you. You might help downstairs, there’ll be a lot of work to do down there.”

They went away and when the door closed, the Major took her hand and said, “I’m going to take care of you now. You’re going away with me, back to New York.”

She didn’t answer him but only lay with her eyes closed, pressing the palms of her hands against the eyeballs and trying to understand what had happened to her and what was to come next.

When she did not answer, he said again, “That’s right, isn’t it? You’re going to let me take care of you?”

She made a great effort to pull herself back out of the fog which she felt gathering about her. She made a great effort to remember the good manners her mother had taught her and give him a polite answer.

“I’ll take care of everything,” he said, “You won’t need to worry about anything.”

She understood that he was trying to be kind, but also it seemed to her odd that he should be in such haste to settle everything. In spite of the harsh realities of Leaping Rock, there was about her a kind of innocence which remained with her to the end of her life, even at the Christmas dinner when she watched granddaughter Madeleine and the cowboy, knowing perfectly well what lay at the bottom of the relationship between them. As an old woman although there was no knowledge beyond her, she still kept the same purifying innocence of spirit.

Now without looking up at him she asked, “Do you mean ... will I marry you?” And she heard him say, “Yes ... why, yes ... of course,” followed by a cough as if he were astonished and embarrassed.

For a second, even in the midst of shock and sorrow, she found herself thinking: That would mean I could escape. Now Ma and Pa are dead there is nothing to keep me in Leaping Rock. I could see the world ... I could do everything.... All the things she had dreamed of as she peeled potatoes and washed dishes looking out across the hot valley at the great pink and purple mountain. She had seen herself glittering with diamonds descending a great stairway. She had seen herself driving out in a carriage with wonderful black horses and a coachman and footman ... sitting at the head of a table where there were ambassadors and millionaires ... speaking French, buying her clothes in Paris ... going to London and Washington.

In a flashing, glittering second all the silly dreams darted, like fireflies, through her brain.

He was patting her hand gently now and the gesture irritated her. It was as if she were a pet dog he was consoling. Even in the heat she was aware of warmth in his hand. She said, “I don’t know. Don’t ask me now.” And then the tears came flooding into her eyes so that she could not speak.

He stayed there with her until at last the sobbing ceased and, relaxed, she fell asleep. Then he went out and called the two harlots and told them to let her lie there until she wakened and go down to the kitchen and see that the supper was prepared for the boarders who had not been killed or injured in the disaster. Himself, he washed up and returned to the mine.