Читать книгу Five Silver Daughters - Louis Golding - Страница 30

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May and Harry Stonier were walking through a tousled meadow by Merseyside one Sunday evening in June. Esther had announced triumphantly, a night or two earlier, the acquisition of the deceased Sir’s house. It was going to take some months before the whole house was really shipshape, for, of course, it wasn’t so easy to get builders and decorators nowadays as it had been. But there was a nucleus of habitability, where an old man and his wife, Hargreaves by name, two retainers of the deceased Sir, had kept the flag flying, not very heartily, since the tragic events at Ivanhoe Towers.

The young people had been discussing the War again, though they had vowed, the last time they had gone out into the country, the matter should not again arise between them, to dim the sun and besmoke the air. To May, as to most young men and women of her age, of all ages in fact, the War was dreadful, but it had necessity, and it had glory. But, unlike most women, she remembered, without a moment’s remission, that, being a woman, the ultimate pains would never be demanded from her. So that, even in those moments when she was caught up in a blaze of pride for England, or made white-hot with anger because of the enemy’s reported wickedness, a certain fundamental delicacy prevented her from so speaking or so acting that a word or a deed for which she was responsible might influence another human creature to a loss of which she herself stood in no danger—a loss of limb or eyes or life, it might be.

Harry Stonier had been crystal-clear in his mind in his attitude to War long before this Great War started. To him the human body was the temple of God. There was no other sacrilege than to defile it or lay hands upon it in any sort of violence. It was not that he shrank from pain as such, as some shrink, with an almost pathological terror. He was himself capable of bearing intense pain without permitting his own awareness of it to be apparent to an onlooker, outside the purely reflex reactions of the brow that grows damp or the eye misted over, when pain is intense enough. He believed in the discipline of the body, as one who would have God’s temple speckless and scoured clean as rocks are by storms. The sacrilege to him was the searing of that holy silk which is the skin, the pulping of that holy bread which is the flesh, the smashing of those holy rods which are the bones, the outraging of those mysteries, so precise, so unfathomable, for which skin and flesh are the casing and bones the support.

It seemed to him a far smaller thing that all Russia should pass to the Kaiser or all Germany to the Tsar than that the ribs and lungs of one lad be confounded, the holiness of his body be violated, in the mingled ooze of damp clay and his own blood.

It had not been possible for them to keep their hearts and their tongues away from this matter of War. Again the shadow came between them. They walked along in silence for some time. The shadow came not because either mistrusted or misvalued the other, but because each was in sore doubt. He asked himself in anguish whether it was seemly to allow his piety to stand in the way of lightening the woes of the million others, if only to the microscopic degree that the participation of one infinitesimal unit would lighten them. She asked herself whether his was not a truer heroism than the heroism of all those marchers who went with the blowing bugles and the flying banners? And if Harry’s heroism was in very truth the truer, was there not something vicious in the marrow of the heroism of the patriot, despite all its magnificences?

And then each answered as, according to the laws of his being, each was forced to. “This,” she said, “is the War to end all Wars. After this there will be no more tearing up of solemn covenants as if they were scraps of paper. And are there not times in human history when the individual must suspend his rights in both body and brain, and hand them into the keeping of the time’s great necessity?” So she argued, as most people argued then, and many still do to-day.

And he said to himself for his part: “For the sake of the countless generations still to be, there can be no compromise with Error. If no more than one or two or three have Truth at the heart of them, they are still its guardians; they must guard it though they die in loneliness and obloquy. In their corruption the spark will not be wholly extinguished. A wind will breathe upon the spark; a great fire will be lit; the blaze will go up to the middle parts of the sky and all men be dazzled by it.”

The young people walked heavily for some time. But, as they moved, the quiet of the June sunlight came down upon their brows, resting there and fluttering, like the white butterflies that declined in and out of the wood’s edge, as if they were that quiet rendered into shape.

They came to a bank which sloped upward into an overhanging of hazel branches. The small woodland flowers, speedwell and dogwood, wood sorrel, campion, star of Bethlehem, spilled down like water. They sat down. He looked down upon the flowers by his right hand, straightened their stalks, and with the tip of a finger delicately stroked their petals. He abandoned these, and with the fingers of his left hand sought for hers where they lay pale in the grass. He found them, and imprisoned them for a time, as if he had feared they might not be there by now, might not be anywhere at all for him to find them. Then his mind, it seemed, became easy again. It was as if he were aware now they were not butterflies and would not take wing. They were flowers. They had roots. He straightened them. With the tip of a finger he delicately stroked their petals.

Then he turned round towards her. Her eyes were shut. He moved his mouth towards the centre of her brow and touched it, no more roughly than a swallow slides against the water. “I love you,” he said. Her eyes opened. They smiled back into his. Her lips moved, but uttered no audible sound. “I love you, too,” they said.

They rose and walked on again. Then she turned to him. “Harry,” she said, “it’s going to be so much easier and quicker now.”

“What is, darling? What can be easier now?”

“When we move into—into——Oh, it’s too ridiculous! I can’t talk of it as Ivanhoe Towers. It makes me blush!” Duly, she blushed. Her eyes twinkled. “But you should hear Esther talk of it—with a frightful attempt at being casual. Can you imagine Esther being casual? It’s like a regiment of artillery going down a cobbled street!”

“What’s going to be easier, darling?”

“To get out. Those coppices and dingles on the Mitchen where you feel you’re five hundred miles from Doomington. Do you remember our bluebell place? And all those lambs with black faces? Just like the children at playtime in Aubrey Street School—excepting that the lambs weren’t behind railings. Do you remember?”

“Yes.”

“It’ll be so much easier, your calling for me at—at—I—van—hoe Tow—ers....” She swelled herself out, took a large stride to each syllable, boomed each syllable like a seneschal summoning his lord to banquet in his raftered hall. She was, in fact, being Esther.

“No, May!”

His voice was very quiet. So quiet that her heart took fright at once. She shrank down into herself.

“What do you mean, Harry?”

“I won’t call for you at Ivanhoe Towers.”

“But, why not? Harry, I don’t understand. Have you heard that story of the old man who—who committed suicide there, and they say that his wife—oh, Harry, it can’t be that?”

“No, it’s not that.”

“Well, then?”

“You get hardened to the tragedies of old folks these days. It’s not that.”

She shook her head, her eyes full of trouble. But he did not perceive it, for on his eyes there was a sort of grey sheen, such as you find on stretches of water before they freeze.

“I can’t go to Ivanhoe Towers!” he said. She saw a muscle harden on the left side of his jaw, which she knew, and loved, and feared. “There are two reasons why I can’t go. Your father’s becoming a rich man. He’s becoming a rich man out of a War which is dreadful to me. You know how dreadful.” He closed his eyes, and, in the instantaneous horror of the vision which he evoked, all the colour seemed to go out of the skin of his face, and the flesh to go saggy under the cheek-bones.

“But, Harry,” she implored him. “It had already begun, his getting rich. It began last year, the year before that. The time when Smirnof——”

“It’s out of the War the big money, the hideous money, is coming.”

“What can I do, what can I do?” she begged. He ignored her still.

“He’s going to be a rich man. It’s going to be hard not to become a rich man out of this War. I’m not going to go hanging round a rich man’s door, snuffling after his daughter.”

“Harry!” she cried out. “How dare you talk like that? Oh, how dare you?”

The pain in her voice bit deep into his heart. He halted there, in the grassy path by the river. “You,” he said. “You! I wasn’t talking about you at all!” Her head drooped. She looked down upon the ground, utterly woebegone.

“I love you very much!” he said.

“You don’t!” Her voice choked with tears, like a child’s. He put one arm around her shoulder, and with one hand forced her forehead back until he made her eyes look up into his own.

“Do I love you very much?” he asked.

“Ye—e—yes!” she brought out through the catches of her breath.

“It’s going to rain,” he said. “We’d best be getting back.”