Читать книгу The Constant Nymph - Margaret Kennedy Kennedy - Страница 11

The top of the pass was such a quiet place that Teresa very soon recovered her peace of mind. She could see nothing of the trees or the world of men, since the valley leading down to Weissau was full of clouds. Above and around her was the sky, empty save for the moon. Mountain peaks stood up in that space, bare to the light. She was at a point where the track balanced itself for a moment on the ridge and then dived into an inky valley on the far side. From that blackness rose the echoing murmur of many waterfalls, so that the pit of night was full of sound. She stood, looking down, already calmer.

By the path was a small wooden Calvary marking a spring, and near it a grotto of stones built the year before by Paulina and Sebastian. They had said it was for prayer and meditation, which was strange, for neither of them was much given to this employment; but the building had kept them happy for three weeks. Winter storms had blown it down, and it lay now a tumbled heap of stones beside the crucifix with its penthouse roof. Teresa thought how nice it would be to build, not a grotto, but a little house where she could live always, watching the blizzards blown across the pass, and the snow melting, and the flowers of Spring pushing up through the grass. And in the Summer she would have a cornet, and, hidden in the mountains, she would play lovely tunes and give terrific shocks to lonely travellers toiling over the pass with their knapsacks. For nobody should know of the little house.

She climbed a knoll, the highest point near by, and stared round her. In every direction she could see for miles and miles, but the view was simple, a succession of serene ranges sticking up into emptiness. The moon had painted them all a uniform black and white, and the sky was no colour at all. It was a simplification which delighted her; she needed it. There were, usually, too many things. The people and colours and noises crowded her mind with ideas and confused her. Often she felt that she saw nothing clearly, but here, where there was so very little to see, it might be managed. She turned round to the Königsjoch, which hung almost above her, and took a good look at it. Its stony crags, its snowfields, and the smooth, bare outline of its summit seemed almost near enough to touch, yet she knew them to be miles away. She stared hungrily, trying to stamp this image on her mind and thus secure it for ever and ever. She became entranced with it. As she looked she had an idea, a passionate hope, which took her breath away. If she could ever see but one thing properly she might quite easily see God.

The thought so moved her that she flung herself down on the short wind-blown grass and gazed up into the sky above her, waiting, rigid in an effort to reach singleness of mind. Nothing happened. In a few minutes she became painfully exhausted and very cold. The wind in her hair came straight off the snowfields. She began to think more kindly of her exasperating family down at the Karindehütte. She would go back to them.

She pulled herself together for the descent, aware that a frightful weariness was aching in all her bones. Glancing down towards the path she saw that a man was standing there, staring at the mountains in a kind of lost trance, as if he had discovered the secret thing which had escaped her. It was Lewis. She blew a loving little kiss at his unconscious figure thinking how well she was acquainted with the shape of his head at the back. She could have drawn it with her eyes shut; she had sat so often watching him while he conducted symphonies to which she did not always listen. And in this place he did not look more solitary than he always seemed in crowded concert halls.

Presently his vision seemed to break up, and he took to walking about, in a distraught frenzy, stumbling sometimes, and often almost running. She knew what ailed him and was very sorry. Living in a family of artists she had come to regard this implacable thing which took them as a great misfortune. Oddly enough it had missed her out; alone of the tribe, she was safe from it. She did not believe that she would ever be driven to these monstrous creative efforts. She desired nothing but to be allowed to look on at the world; and the result of her observations had been that she rated the writing of music as an atrocious and painful disease. She pitied her friend when it assailed him as much as if he had fallen down and broken his leg. To her the thing was a hidden curse, a family werewolf, always ready to spring out and devour them all. It was at the bottom of most of their misfortunes. Its place in her scheme of things was approximate to the position which the devil might hold in the mind of a better instructed little girl.

‘Poor Lewis,’ she murmured. ‘I thought as much! He’s been looking like a broody hen all the week.’

She guessed that he must not discover her and was for stealing off down the far side of the hill when he caught sight of her. Immediately he hailed her, bounding up the slope very quickly, so that she could not get away.

‘Tessa! What are you doing here? Aren’t you cold?’

He spoke almost mechanically, as if he hardly knew what he said. She saw that he was shaken and unhappy at being caught off his guard. She said that she had come up to look at the moon, and he smiled rather sourly.

‘It’s a pity to go moon gazing at your age,’ he told her. ‘But I suppose it’s a symptom.’

‘What of?’

‘The green sickness.’

‘What’s that? It sounds very disagreeable.’

He looked as if he meant it to be disagreeable. He insisted upon explaining himself with a bitterness which said to her, as plainly as possible, that she was not to suppose he was come to these moonlit mountains because he found them at all beautiful, or that he had any regard for the feelings of anyone else who might happen to think so. She felt that he deserved to be teased a little, and when he had done she said:

‘What a ray of sunshine you are! It was the green sickness, I suppose, brought you up here. I thought at first you’d come to look for that sixpence we lost two years ago. I saw you running round in rings.’

‘How long have you been up here?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘Longer than you. You disturbed me.’

‘Why didn’t you say so?’

‘I didn’t want to be disturbed. I was busy thinking I was just going off quietly to a less crowded part of this mountain when you must needs interrupt me.’

She was edging away from him. He saw suddenly that she was really afraid of him. Something that he had said must have hurt her. He laughed and asked what she was thinking of, whereat she took to her heels, ignoring his shout that she should stop. Wildly she fled down the hill, terrified, hearing him gain upon her, and seized by the primitive panic of the hunted. When, quite soon, he caught her, she screamed loudly.

‘Damn you! Why can’t you stop when I call?’ he panted. ‘Now tell me … My God, Tessa! What’s the matter?’

‘Go away!’

‘Have you got a handkerchief?’ he asked presently. ‘Because I lent mine to Tony, who also needed it tonight.’

At the mention of Tony her tears ceased abruptly. She turned away from him with a slight, wounded gesture, and was silent.

‘This seems to be a habit in your family,’ he jibed. ‘If you’ve got a handkerchief, perhaps I’d better retire.’

But he did not offer to go. He stood still, watching her intently, full of a sort of compunction. She was nearer than he liked to the rocky edge of the path, which dropped away to a sea of clouds below. He had an apprehension that she might spring over if he moved or touched her. He waited and was startled to hear her speaking in a low voice, almost to herself:

‘Tony’s been crying all the evening.’

‘Oh, Tony!’ he exclaimed impatiently.

And he took a short turn along the path, away from her, as if he was afraid that she would force upon him some piece of information about Tony. He did not want to hear anything about Tony. She was a white flower, cast into the pit. He had been very fond of her when she was a little wild thing, like Tessa, a delicate, audacious creature, trapped now in the inevitable mill. No man endowed with heart and imagination could care to contemplate such a spectacle.

Lewis had both these commodities in a distressing degree. He spent his life in running away from them, and his cruelty was a kind of instinctive defence which he had set up against them. His refuge had been a sombre arrogance which denied to the rest of the world capacities for suffering equal to his own. He hurt his friends by way of demonstrating for his own satisfaction their comfortable insensibility. He really wished to convince himself that the majority of mankind is too stupid to apprehend anything keener than physical pain, and he nourished this illusion by a perverse frequenting of the company of people who were, for the most part, more brutal than himself.

Even so, he was not altogether safe. On the occasions when, despite his resistance, some sorrow of the outer world pierced the armour of his egotism, he was, out of all proportion, disturbed, simply because he would not admit that tears are the common lot. He fled from his own compassion.

He had done his best, of late, to avoid Antonia, and, if it had been possible, he would have avoided Teresa while she was thus shaken with the reverberations of her sister’s evil fortune. Only that he could never fly from Teresa. She was a darling, simply, and must always be comforted, even though his own ineptitude had done the damage. She was the sweet exception to all the young, fierce generalisations with which he dismissed the world. He came back to her and took her arm and began to walk her up the hill again, consoling and protesting rather incoherently:

‘Don’t worry about Tony, my dear love. She’ll be all right. She’ll settle down. She’s … she’s just growing up. That’s not comfortable. But it happens to everybody. God help them!’

Teresa seemed hardly to listen, but his last sentence caught her attention and she asked curiously:

‘Do you believe in God then?’

He thought about it and said that he did.

‘Though I’m blest if I know what I mean when I say it. What do you believe, Tessa?’

She hesitated and then told him how, a few minutes since, she had felt herself to be on the brink of a discovery.

‘I didn’t see anything,’ she said sadly ‘That’s because I’m so very ignorant. When I say God, I don’t know what I mean. If I was Roberto I’d be better off, for I would know. I’d mean that God up there.’

And she nodded towards the Calvary, standing out clear against the sky above them, guarding even in this lonely place the secret of man’s eternal pain.

‘You don’t mean Him?’ she asked Lewis rather doubtfully.

Lewis replied, almost furiously, that he did not. He hurried her past the place and they wandered away, round the corner of the hill, to a sort of platform where they could look across at the Karwendal ranges, distant, icy, inhuman. Here, if anywhere, dwelt the divinity which they both worshipped. They sat down together on the grass and fell to talking in hushed tones as if afraid of disturbing the silent immensity of the night. He told her a number of things, he hardly knew what; small, absurd things which he had seen and done in his wandering life. They caught her attention and soothed her distress. Soon she was laughing, and when at last they set off for home she was skipping along beside him with the light-heartedness which usually belonged to her.

He had always thought her the pick of the bunch. She was an admirable, graceless little baggage, entirely to his taste. She amused him, invariably. And, queerly enough, she was innocent. That was an odd thing to say of one of Sanger’s daughters, but it was the truth. Innocence was the only name he could find for the wild, imaginative solitude of her spirit. The impudence of her manners could not completely hide it, and beyond it he could discern an intensity of mind which struck him as little short of a disaster in a creature so fragile and tender, so handicapped by her sex. She would give herself to pain with a passionate readiness, seeing only its beauty, with that singleness of vision which is the glory and the curse of such natures. He wondered anxiously, and for the first time, what was to become of her.

He knew.

He had always known, and until tonight he had taken it for granted. She was barely two years younger than that sister whose history she would inevitably repeat. Paulina, too, was fashioned for the same fate. Unbalanced, untaught, fatally warm-hearted, endowed with none of the stolid prudence which had protected the more fortunate Kate, they were both likely to set about the grimy business of life in much the same way. He knew what company they kept; lust, a blind devourer, a brutish, uncomprehending Moloch, haunted their insecure youth, claiming them as predestined victims.

And tonight he discovered that he could not accept this. He had always supposed, vaguely, that Teresa would spare his feelings by growing up quite suddenly of her own accord; leaping into an experienced maturity which should demand no compassion. Now he grasped disturbing possibilities. While she was still so childish, so liable to be hurt, she ought to be safeguarded. She must be … she must be shut up. There were too many Birnbaums about. He scowled so dreadfully and marched her down the hill at such a pace that she wanted to ask him what was the matter now. He could not know that he was humming that song which Caryl had written for Kate, since he had heartily abused it. Yet the tune of it was on his lips:

lch schau dich an und Wehmuth

Schleicht mir in’s Herz hinein.

He need not have distressed himself so violently on her account. She was guarded by the constant simplicity of her young heart. He was himself the only man who could ever betray it, and she had been his, had he known it, as long as she could remember. Her love was as natural and necessary to her as the breath she drew, which is, perhaps, the reason why he divined nothing of it. And if he had known he would not, probably, have thought her fortunate. He would have wished her a better fancy. As it was, he thought that if she were his little girl he would put her into a convent. He knew little of convents, but he imagined that they were safer for girls than Sanger’s circus. Lina, by way of precaution, ought to be in one too. It would be dull, perhaps, but there were, on the whole, worse things than dullness. He wondered whether he could, as an intimate friend, persuade Sanger to take some steps about it.

They parted at the house door and he climbed up to his room in the annexe. Teresa danced away to the girls’ bedroom and remembered on the threshold that Antonia might still be crying there. She put her head round the door and saw that the room was empty. It was a large barn of a place with very little furniture. There was one bed for Kate and Tony and another for Tessa and Lina. Kate’s clothes were packed away in a painted chest under the window, but the entire wardrobe of the other young ladies lay about permanently in heaps on the floor amid books, music, guitars, cigarette ends, cherry stones, and dust. Entering hastily, Teresa began to pull off her clothes and fling them down about the room as she promenaded in the moonlight, humming gaily her little duet with Lewis in ‘Breakfast with the Borgias’. An old pair of Kate’s stays lay across a chair and she tried them on, observing with dismal accuracy how far too ample was their fit.

‘Yet Kate’s not fat,’ she reflected, ‘it’s I who am such a scarecrow. I wish I was Caterina.’

This was a sister of Roberto who had helped with the housework in Genoa and who, at fifteen, possessed a figure which was the secret envy of Teresa and Paulina. In their eyes a southern richness of outline was the height of beauty and they deeply deplored their own angular contours. Teresa was still sitting in her brief chemise wondering sadly how to grow fat when Paulina sauntered into the room, and, after glancing twice behind her in a nervous way, began in a scared whisper:

‘I say … Tessa …’

‘Yes?’

Paulina shuffled her feet, unable to proceed.

‘Yes! What is it?’

‘Oh, Tessa!’ cried Paulina with a little gasp.

‘Espèce d’imbécile! What’s the matter?’

Paulina came quite close and clutched her arm.

‘I’m frightened,’ she said in a very low voice.

‘What? Lina, what is it?’

‘Will you come, please?’

‘Come! Where?’

‘Tony and I are frightened … at a very funny thing.’

‘A funny thing! Where?’

‘In … in Sanger’s room.’

‘Were you in there?’

‘No. We heard it. Outside the door.’

The sacredness of Sanger’s room was an unbroken law. No child ever ventured there without express permission.

‘What did you hear?’

‘A funny noise. Do come, Tessa!’

Teresa got up and made for her father’s room.

‘Is Caryl there, Lina?’

‘No,’ panted Paulina, still clutching her arm. ‘He’s gone down to the valley to help Kate carry up the milk.’

They climbed the stairs to the top landing, where they found Antonia and Sebastian listening intently outside Sanger’s closed door.

‘It’s nothing; he’s just snoring,’ asserted Antonia.

‘Listen, Tessa!’ commanded the boy.

She listened and wondered that the whole house did not tremble.

‘He’s not snoring,’ she said. ‘He’s sort of groaning. We ought to go in. He must be ill.’

‘Oh, we can’t,’ objected Antonia. ‘Think what a to-do there was last time we did.’

‘Well then, get Linda. She doesn’t mind annoying him.’

‘I thought of her,’ whispered Antonia. ‘I went to her room to fetch her. But I didn’t like to go in. She … she’s got somebody in there. I heard them whispering.’

They waited some seconds longer and then Teresa, mastering her panic, stole downstairs to Linda’s door and listened. She could hear nothing at first and was just going to knock when she caught a stifled laugh and knew that Tony had been right. She crept away, up to the others, who were waiting outside a room which was now dreadfully silent.

‘It’s stopped,’ breathed Paulina.

They clung together, straining for the least sound, and all started violently when a padding footstep crossed the room.

‘That’s Gelert,’ said Sebastian reassuringly. ‘I heard him whining a minute ago.’

The dog whimpered faintly and gave two short yelping barks, ending in a long howl. Paulina whispered that it was funny that Sanger did not swear at him. But no voice came, only a furious scratching at the door and another appalling howl.

‘I’m going in,’ Teresa stated. ‘Something funny must have happened. Somebody ought to go. I don’t care if there is a row. Will you come, Tony?’

But Antonia drew back crying that she was afraid. Teresa opened the door and was nearly flung down by Gelert, who bounded past them and fled howling along the passage. Sebastian pushed in front of her and advanced into the room, remarking:

‘I’ll come with you. I expect you’d like a man.’

The lamp showed the floor all covered with sheets of music, and an overturned ink-pot and their father sprawling across the table at which he sat, his face hidden.

‘He’s fainted,’ suggested Teresa. ‘We ought to give him brandy.’

Sebastian tugged at the heavy body, trying to turn it over, his white face flushing with the strain. They both pulled and the chair with Sanger in it toppled over and went thudding to the floor. She bounded towards the table for a brandy flask, but her brother, looking at the face which gaped up at them, said:

‘It’s no use. He’s dead.’

‘Oh, no! No!’

She knelt beside her father, pouring brandy into his mouth and over his face and over the music on the floor until Sebastian took the flask from her and led her from the room, repeating:

‘It’s no use, Tessa. He’s dead. We must get people. I’ll go and look for Ike. You fetch Lewis.’

‘Oh, Lewis … I must get Lewis …’

She whispered his name to herself as she crossed the moonlit space between the house and the annexe. She had to walk rather slowly because of the ache of terror which seemed to numb all her limbs. The stairs to his door seemed difficult to climb. She stood, fingering the latch, telling him what had happened. And Lewis, who had been lying half-dressed on his bed, jumped up and began to put on his boots. His coat he wrapped round Teresa, for she was shivering, and he took her back into the house. Her father’s room was full of people. Roberto and Birnbaum were there, bending over Sanger’s body, and Sebastian was trying to mop up the ink on the floor. They were all dazed and silent until Linda, in a pink silk wrapper with all her yellow hair blazing on her shoulders, burst into the room. Trigorin followed her. When she saw what had happened she turned a queer chalky white and burst into noisy, unrestrained weeping. Her loud cries rang through the stricken house so that Caryl and Kate, coming up from the valley, heard and knew that calamity had overtaken them all.