Читать книгу Adrian Savage - Lucas Malet - Страница 7

Yes, she told herself, she really had a great regard for René Dax. He touched her. And now she, undoubtedly, passed a wholly delightful three-quarters of an hour in his and the little girls' company, Madame Vernois looking on, meanwhile, sympathetic yet slightly perplexed. For Gabrielle, in her reaction of feeling, forgetful of her black dress and twenty-seven years, and the rather tedious restraints and dignities of her matronhood, was taken with the sprightliest humor. She remembered that three-quarters of an hour now with a degree of regret. If only it could have stopped at that! But, unfortunately, things went further.

For, at parting, she had lingered in the gallery, where the haggard whiteness of the snow-glare struggled with the deepening twilight, thanking René Dax for his kindness to the children and for the happy afternoon he had given them. The sense of holiday, of playtime, was still upon her and she spoke with unaccustomed gaiety and intimacy of tone.

The young man looked up at her attentively, queerly—the top of his head barely level with her shoulder—and answered, a certain harshness observable in his carefully modulated voice:

"Do not spoil it all by accusing me of a good action. In accusing me of that you do my intelligence a gross injustice. My conduct has been dictated, as always, by calculated selfishness."

And, when she smilingly protested, he went on:

"I have many faults, no doubt. But I am guiltless of the weakness of altruism—contemptible word, under which the modern mind tries to conceal its cowardice and absence of all sound philosophy. I am an egoist, dear Madame, believe me, an egoist pure and simple."

He paused, looking down with an effect of the utmost gravity at his very small and exquisitely shod feet.

"It happened, for reasons with which it is superfluous to trouble you, that to-day I required a change of atmosphere. I needed to bathe myself in innocence. I cast about for the easiest method of performing such ablutions, and my thought traveled to Mademoiselle Bette. The weather being odious, it was probable I should find her in the house. My plan succeeded to admiration. Have no delusions under that head. It is invariably the altruist, not the egoist, whose plans miscarry or are foiled!"

He took a long breath, stretching his puny person.

"I am better. I am cleansed," he said. "For the moment at least I am restored, renewed. And for this restoration the reason is at once simple and profound. You must understand," he went on, in a soft conversational manner, as one stating the most obvious common-place, "my soul when it first entered my body was already old, immeasurably old. It had traversed countless cycles of human history. It had heard things no man may repeat and live. It had fed on gilded and splendid corruptions. It had embraced the forbidden and hugged nameless abominations to its heart. It had gazed on the naked face of the Ultimate Self-Existent Terror whose breath drives the ever-turning Wheel of Being. It had galloped back, appalled, through the blank, shouting nothingness, and clothed itself in the flesh of an unborn, unquickened infant, thus for a brief space obtaining unconsciousness and repose."

René Dax looked up at her again, his little, tired face very solemn, his eyes glowing as though a red lamp burned behind them.

"Has it ever occurred to you why we worship our mothers?" he asked. "It is not because they bring us into life, but because for nine sacred months they procure us blessed illusion of non-living. How can we ever thank them sufficiently for this? And that," he added, "is why at times, as to-day, I am driven to seek the society of young children. It rests and refreshes me to be near them, because they have still gone but a few steps along the horrible, perpetually retrodden pathway. They have not begun to recognize the landmarks. They have not yet begun to remember. They fancy they are here for the first time. Past and future are alike unrealized by them. The aroma of the enchanted narcotic of non-living, which still exhales from their speech and laughter, renders their neighborhood infinitely soothing to a soul like mine, staggering beneath the paralyzing burden of a knowledge of accumulated lives."

Whether the young man had spoken sincerely, giving voice to a creed he actually, however mistakenly, held, or whether his utterances were merely a pose, the outcome of a perverse and morbid effort at singularity, Madame St. Leger was uncertain. Still it was undeniable that those utterances—whether honest or not—and the somber visions evoked by them remained, distressing and perplexing her with a dreary horror of non-progression, of perpetual and futile spinning in a vicious circle, of perpetual and futile actual sameness throughout perpetual apparent change.

So far all the essentials of the Faith in which she had been born and educated remained to her. Yet, too often now, as she sorrowfully admitted, her declaration of that Faith found expression in the disciple's cry, "Lord, I believe; help Thou my unbelief." For unbelief, reasoned not merely scoffing, had, during these years of intercourse with the literary and artistic world of Paris, become by no means inconceivable to her. More than half the people she met smiled at, if they might not openly repudiate, Christianity. It followed that she no longer figured the Faith to herself as a "fair land and large" wherein she could dwell in happy security, but rather as a fortress set on an island of somewhat friable rock, against which winds and waves beat remorselessly. And truly, at moments—cruel moments, which she dreaded—the onslaught of modern ideas, of the modern attitude in its contempt of tradition and defiance of authority—flinging back questions long since judged and conclusions long established into the seething pot of individual speculation—seemed to threaten final undermining of that rock and consequent toppling of the fortress of Faith surmounting it into the waters of a laughing, envious, all-swallowing sea. This troubled her the more because certain modern ideas—notably that of emancipated and self-sustained womanhood—appealed to and attracted her. Was there no middle way? Was no marriage between the old Faith and the new science, the new democracy, possible? If you accepted the latter, did negations and denials logically follow, compelling you to let the former go?

And so it came about that to-night, she alone waking in the sleeping house, the gloomy pictures called up by René Dax's strange talk held her painfully. They stood between her and sleep, between her and prayer, heightening her restlessness and suggesting thoughts very subversive of Christian theology and Christian ethics.

Gabrielle rose from her chair and moved to and fro, her hands clasped behind her. She never remembered to have felt like this before. The room seemed too narrow, too neat, its appointments too finicking and orderly, to contain her erratic and overflowing mental activity. The abiding mystery which not only surrounds each individual life, but permeates each individual nature, the impassable gulf which divides even the nearest and most unselfishly loved—even she herself and her own darling little Bette—from one another, presented itself oppressive and distressing as a nightmare. Just now it appeared to her inconceivable that to-morrow she would rise just as usual, satisfied to accept conventions, subscribe to compromises, take things in general at their face value, while contentedly expending her energies of brain and body upon trivialities of clothes, housekeeping, gossip, the thousand and one ephemeral interests and occupations of a sheltered, highly civilized woman's daily existence. The inadequacy, the amazing futility of it all!

Then, half afraid of the great stillness, she stood perfectly quiet, listening to the desolate cry of the wind along the house-roofs and its hissing against the window-panes.

"'My soul has gazed on the Ultimate Self-Existent Terror whose breath drives the ever-turning Wheel of Being,'" she murmured as she listened. "'It galloped back, appalled, through the blank, shouting nothingness'"—

Yes, that was dreadful conception of human fate! But what if it were true? Millions believed it, or something very closely akin to it, away in the East, in those frightening lands of yellow sunrise and yellow, expressionless peoples of whom it always alarmed her to think! Swiftly her mind made a return upon the three men, living and dead, who to-day had so deeply affected her, breaking up her practised calm and self-restraint. She ranged them side by side, and, in her present state of exaltation, they severally and equally—though for very different reasons—appeared to her as enemies against whom she was called upon to fight. Seemed to her as tyrants, either of whom to sustain his own insolent, masculine supremacy schemed to enslave her, to rob her of her intellectual and physical freedom, of her so jealously cherished ownership of herself.

"'It galloped back through the blank, shouting nothingness,'" she repeated. But there came the sharpest sting of the situation. For to what covert? Where could her soul take sanctuary since friendship and marriage proved so full of pitfalls, and her fortress of Faith was just now, as she feared, shaken to the base?

Then, the homeless cry of the wind finding echo in her homelessness of spirit, a sort of anger upon her, blind anger against things as they are, she moved over to the window, drew back the curtains and opened the locked casements. The cold clutched her by the throat, making her gasp for breath, making her flesh sting and ache. Yet the apprehension of a Presence, steadying and fortifying in its great simplicity of strength, compelled her to remain. She knelt upon the window-seat and leaned out between the inward opening casements, planting her elbows on the window-ledge and covering her mouth with her hands to protect her lips from the blistering chill.

Outside was the wonder of an unknown Paris, a vacant, frozen, voiceless Paris, wrapped in a winding-sheet of newly fallen snow. Under the lamps, along the quay immediately below, that winding-sheet glittered in myriad diamond points, a uniform surface as yet unbroken by wheel tracks or footprints—misery, pleasure, business, alike in hiding from the bitter frost. Elsewhere it spread in a heavy, muffling bleachedness, from the bosom of which walls, buildings, bridges reared themselves strangely unsubstantial, every ledge and projection enameled in white. Beneath the Pont des Arts on the right and the Pont des Saints Pères on the left—each very distinct with glistening roadway and double row of lamps—the river ran black as ink. The trees bordering the quays were black, a spidery black, in their agitated, wind-tormented bareness. And the sky was black, too, impenetrable, starless, low and flat, engulfing the many domes, monuments, and towers of Paris, engulfing even the roofs and pavilions of the Louvre along the opposite bank of the Seine, inclosing and curiously isolating the scene. This effect of an earth so much paler and, for the most part, so much less solid than the sky above it, this effect of buildings rising from that pallor to lose themselves in duskiness, was unnatural and disquieting in a high degree. The sentiment of this desert, voiceless Paris was more disquieting still. For Gabrielle retained something of the provincial's persistent distrust of the siren personality of la ville lumière. The wonderful and brilliant city had enthralled her imagination, but had never quite conquered her affections. Now, leaning out of the high-set window, she gazed as far as sight carried, east, west, and north, while a vague, deep-seated excitement possessed her. It was as though she touched the verge of some extraordinary revelation, some tremendous crisis of the cosmic drama. Had universal paralysis seized the heart of things, she asked herself, of which this desert, voiceless Paris was the symbol? Had the ever-turning Wheel of Being ceased to turn, struck into immobility, as the world-famous city appeared to be, by some miracle of incalculable frost?

The cry of the wind answered. So the wind, at least, was alive and awake yet, as were the black seaward-flowing waters of the river.

Then suddenly, unexpectedly, along with that homeless cry of the wind hailing from she knew not what immense desolation of polar spaces, came a small, plaintive, human cry close at hand.

Hearing which last the young woman sprang down from her kneeling place, locked the gaping casements together, and ran lightly and swiftly into the adjoining room. There in the warm dimness, her hands outstretched grasping the rail of her cot on either side, slim little Bette sat woefully straight up on end.

"Mamma, mamma," she wailed, "come and hold me tight, very tight! I have had a bad dream. I am frightened. M. René Dax touched all my toys, all my darling, tiny saucepans and kettles, all my dolls and Teddy-bears with his little walking-cane. And it was terrifying. They all came alive and chased me. Hold me tight. I am so frightened. They rushed along. They chased me and chased me. They panted. Their mouths were open. I could see their red tongues. And they yelped as the little pet dogs do in the public gardens when they try to catch the sparrows. I called and called to you, but you were not there. You did not come. I tried very hard to run away, but my feet stuck to the floor. They were so very heavy I could not lift them. It is not true? Tell me it is not true. He cannot touch all my toys with his little cane and make them come alive? I think I shall be afraid ever to play with them any more. They were so dreadfully unkind. Tell me it is not true!"

"No, no, my angel," Gabrielle declared, soothingly. "It is not true, not in the very least true. It is only a silly dream. All the poor toys are quite good. You will find them obedient and loving, asking ever so prettily to be played with again to-morrow morning."

She took the slender, soft, warm body up in her arms—it was sweet with the flower-like sweetness of perfect cleanliness and health—and held it close against her. And for the moment perplexities, far-reaching speculations and questionings were obliterated in a passion of tenderness for this innocent life, this innocent body, which was the fruit of her own life and her own body. All else fell away from her, leaving her motherhood triumphant and supreme.

The child, making good the opportunity, began to wheedle and coax.

"I think it is really very cold in my bed," she said. "I am sure it would be far warmer in yours. And I may dream M. Dax came back and touched my toys with his little walking-cane and made them naughty if I remain here by myself. Do not you think it would be rather dangerous to leave me here alone? I might wake grandmamma if I were to be terrified again and to scream. I like your big bed so very much best."

The consequence of all of which was that Gabrielle St. Leger said her rosary that night fingering the beads with one hand while the other clasped the sleeping child, whose pretty head lay on her bosom. Her mind grew calm. The fortress of Faith stood firm again, as she thankfully believed, upon its foundation of rock. She recovered her justness of attitude toward departed husband and absent lover. But she determined to reduce her intercourse with M. René Dax to a minimum, since the tricks he played with his little walking-cane seemed liable to be of so revolutionary and disintegrating a character.