Читать книгу The Mandrake Root - Martha Ostenso - Страница 10

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In the snuff-brown quiet of Professor Mueller’s hall, Natalie Monroe had the fluid improbableness of a golden unicorn. This, in a less marked degree, she had everywhere, but the amiable dust of Sibert’s oaken staircase, his faded velvet portières and dun-toned walls, accentuated it to something almost bizarre. Eric, his hands in the pockets of his flannel jacket, stood surveying her with his careless, diagonal smile while she posed before him—posed knowingly, mockingly.

Between them there were no mysteries. Not even mystery, the wider thing. There never had been; they had from the first experienced a mutual recognition with the harsh candor of children, the one seeing in the mirror of the other a being of peculiar brittle arrogance, tempered scorn and disenchantment. The amused fondness they bore each other was merely a projection of a negative endurance; Natalie felt it toward herself, Eric felt it toward himself, and there was nothing to be done fundamentally to alter it.

“Well, do you like it, or don’t you?” she demanded lightly, slapping her black riding boot with her quirt.

Eric looked the new habit judicially up and down. “It looks pretty expensive. Saffron doeskin, or—”

“Expensive? What has that to do with it? It was costly, of course—costly as sin! So you don’t like it?”

“Come in and sit down,” Eric invited. “Sibert has gone to bed.” He put his arm across her hard, slender shoulders as he drew her into the library, and found that the material of her molded jacket was pleasantly soft as human flesh under his hand.

“I do like it,” he admitted as soon as they were seated. “It just happens to be an odd moment for you to be parading it.”

Her eyes, more gold than hazel under their straight, artfully darkened lashes, came back from their restless prowling about the room. She threw her black suède hat to the floor and ran her china white fingers through hair that was the noxious color of certain bright fungi on oak trees. The color was natural, moreover, though few believed that.

“Don’t be mysterious, darling,” she said. “Don’t I often ride at night?”

“Of course. I wasn’t referring to that. Sibert and I have just come back from visiting Barney Olson—the truck driver, you remember?”

“Yes, I remember, but—”

“Barney risked his life for ten dollars that he had to have for food—for his four kids—and then you come sailing in with an outfit that must have cost a couple of hundred.”

Natalie smiled, an arrowed, lovely smile of relief. “I was afraid there was something really serious in your mood. I was really afraid you were ill again.”

She lighted a cigarette and stretched her long, jet-booted legs toward the fire.

“Well,” Eric prompted her, “what’s your mysterious mood all about? Don’t you know I’m supposed to be an invalid and should have been in bed an hour ago?”

“Yes, darling. But, look—I came over about something really important, Eric. You know that poky little private school that Uncle Will is a trustee of? Well, the old dear came across this afternoon in a really handsome manner. He promised me he’d get you on the staff there by mid-year, if he had to endow a chair. They need a new wing, or a lab. or something, and Unco’s money talks.”

“You’re comforting, Nat.” Eric smiled to cover the hateful flush that was creeping up over his temples. “You’re the only one I know who isn’t trying to spare my feelings with a lot of soft soap.”

“Oh, tripe! Now I suppose your pride is hurt. But I’m not trying to spare your feelings. I haven’t thought twice about that Daisy Fuller affair since it happened. As far as that goes, nobody in his right mind could have blamed you if you had—”

“For God’s sake!”

“I’m not suggesting that you did, darling. I confess I should have been rather tickled if you had, but I know you too well to suspect anything of that sort. You’re a high-minded, cynical prig, Eric Stene. Just the same—the paradoxes in your make-up would fill a book.” She looked at the pink, stiff-glazed petal of her thumb-nail. Her eyes were moody, resentful. “It’s rather a shame I didn’t meet you ten years ago, Eric. Tomorrow I’ll be twenty-nine.”

Eric glanced at his watch. “In fifteen minutes, you mean. Didn’t you tell me three years ago that you were born just after midnight?”

“It’s kind of sweet of you to remember that,” she said.

“Sibert has a couple of bottles of extra dry left from what his brother sent him at Thanksgiving. I know he’d be pleased if we opened one to celebrate the occasion. Shall I go and chill it?”

She angled one shoulder indifferently. “A bottle of beer would do just as well. But whatever you like.”

The clock was striking twelve when Eric, seated opposite Natalie, finally opened the bottle. She was eating some stale peanut brittle she had found in a desk drawer.

“Well, what about the job?” she asked presently, after Eric had drunk to her health and happiness and she had responded with a cheerful, careless grin.

“It’s out, Nat,” he told her simply. “I’m not going to teach any more.”

Her long, red mouth formed a mocking O. “Little boy sulking in a corner, is he?”

“Not at all. I really mean it. That little fracas at Anders has nothing to do with it, either—except that it brought the decision on a little sooner. All my ravings to you about the big things I was doing and was planning to do were just so much poppycock. I don’t fit into pedagogy, and I can’t expect pedagogy to rearrange itself to suit me. The simplest way out is to get out!”

Natalie looked pleased. “I can’t believe my ears, Eric! You’re actually seeing the light at last.”

Significantly, she did not ask him what he was going to do. Nor was that because of any delicacy on her part. Natalie Monroe would see no reason for anyone having a plan beyond tomorrow. She was not frivolously irresponsible, but she refused, with fine contempt, to pit herself against the whims of destiny. She had been desperately hurt once by a glad faith in the future—she would never put herself in the way of being hurt again, let come what might. It was strange how the thought of Kim Wallace could inject itself irrelevantly into any conversation between Eric and Natalie—as if he had known the fellow intimately for years, instead of from a slightly unsavory hearsay.

Although he had no real reason to be grateful to Natalie for not betraying any curiosity concerning his future, Eric was nevertheless deeply grateful. “You may call it ‘seeing the light’ if you wish,” he said. “I could be sentimental and declare that I had seen the darkness. I don’t know where things are heading for, nor whether they’ll be worth a damn when they get there.”

She leaned toward him impulsively. She was vivid rather than beautiful, burning rather than warm; burning on the surface, with the tiredness of ash underneath. And yet at times like this a young dew seemed to fall upon her, and one saw her as she must have been before Kim Wallace, who had been her husband, made of her life a quite different thing.

“Eric,” she said, “this is the time to break away. Let’s really do what we’ve talked about so often. Just get up and go. I have money, you have brains and energy. Let’s go to Russia or to Spain or to China—to dangerous places—wherever they’ll let us in!”

Eric knew that she meant it. He had only to look at her to know. She had nearly a half million dollars in her own name, and there was more to come. But he smiled at her and shook his head.

“That isn’t the way the game is played, Nat. And besides, it wouldn’t solve anything. I’d fail you miserably. In a crisis I’d turn yellow.”

“Of course you would—since you say so. But until then we’d amuse each other.” She came over to him, light and hard, and sat on the arm of his chair. He was not surprised when she kissed him as she did; he had known that when it happened he would receive from her a sterile, naked and destroying passion, without tenderness, without any masking hypocrisy of romance, without any deluded, sentimental assumption that would lead to regrets. She desired at this moment to possess her own fierce and delicious senses; herself, not him.

His arms tightened about her. He laughed, a little unevenly. “Tiger, tiger, burning bright ...”

“I don’t love you, of course,” she said. “Remember that, no matter what happens between us. Not that I have to warn you, darling.”

An empty lassitude came over him all at once, the suddenly spent feeling he had experienced every now and then since his illness. And with it, like a chilling nausea, came resentment toward Natalie for her power to stir him with that barren sensualism which reflected his own.

“Of course I understand you, Nat. You’re a—a good sport.”

He closed his eyes and ran his hand across them, but even as he did so he perceived a tremor and a tension in Natalie that made him wonder how he could with any gallantry release himself from her embrace.

“That was a very tactless remark, Eric,” she said, drawing away from him. She laughed, inconsequentially enough, but through that sound and through his own weariness Eric detected a fine red vein of anger.

She was standing free before him on the hearthrug, a graceful instrument formed, it seemed to him, of some still undiscovered metal. He leaned forward, clasped his hands loosely, wearily, over his knees.

“You’re beautiful, Nat,” he said. “Is that apology enough?”

She picked up her gloves, hat and riding whip. When she faced him to say good-by, she had a desolate wrung-out look, and she did not try to smile.

“It isn’t,” she said, “but I’ll accept it for what it’s worth. I should have remembered that you aren’t entirely well yet. I must be going.”

An insane desire to laugh rode over him; he stepped to the fireplace and mechanically lifted the screen and adjusted it. Then he turned back and gave her his hand. “Good night, Natalie,” he said. “You’re a good scout!” he grinned.

“I’ll accept that,” she said, her sparkling, invulnerable self again. “Let me know when you decide to do something silly, won’t you? I’ll aid and abet, darling—regardless!”