Читать книгу The Mandrake Root - Martha Ostenso - Страница 15

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It was not until after the two hired men had bolted their food and returned to their chores that Eric was able to get any clear impression of Andrew Clarence.

Their meeting had been confused, made faulty by the presence of the swaggering Gifford and the loutish Best, to both of whom Clarence had been deferential and courteous beyond all reason. At table, Andrew had addressed his sparing remarks as frequently to Lucky Best as to Eric, had been as quick to note that Lucky’s plate lacked pork and beans as he had been to pass the butter to his landlord. Toward Gifford he had offered patient, solicitous and companionable queries concerning details of the work on the farm. Gifford, preening himself, had been brisk and plausible in his replies. Eric looked about the kitchen. Beneath the brown old beams there was, he observed, a modern sparkle that had not been there in his memory. On the other hand, the range and the oak cupboard with its touch-worn shelves were just as they used to be, and the simple-curtained windows looked out on nighttime just as they used to look.

It was not until the hired men had gone out that Andrew Clarence came sharply into focus before Eric’s eyes. It was a strange thing. Eric had seen, on that one visit he had paid to Europe, faces like the face of Andrew Clarence. He had seen them in dim, unrenowned chapels and in great museums, too, where the crude beginnings of sacred art were housed. This man, with his long, severely chiseled head, his burning, deep-set eyes, had upon him the look of early Christian martyrs. His face bore the dreadful stamp of saintliness. Saintliness—a word anachronistic and abhorrent to Eric, but in this unexpected case of Andrew Clarence, felicitous and disconcertingly stirring.

“You and I shall have our coffee in the living room, Mr. Stene,” Clarence said, getting up from the table. “I have a little while yet before I must go.”

In the living room the old simple bareness was gone. A woman’s affectionate and imaginative care had touched these cretonnes, these hooked rugs, the cushions and the polished brass candlesticks. A low blue bowl of pearly-everlastings decorated the maple table back of the deep couch which faced the fireplace. And in the corner between the pleasantly draped windows there stood a modest upright piano. On the rack appeared Brahms and Chopin and Tchaikowsky. Eric found himself unsurprised. Andrew Clarence, he felt sure, would be quite capable of sitting down and rendering these masters at least gracefully, even if not altogether with distinction.

But Clarence, coming up behind him, said, “My wife plays—not badly. I am sorry she is not here. It’s her piano.” His smile was one of tender indulgence, faintly lighted with humor. “She brought it up here from her mother’s home when we were married. It’s pretty old, of course, but it isn’t bad, really. And Lydie gives me a good deal of pleasure from it.”

So his wife’s name was Lydie. Lydia?

“Is Mrs. Clarence’s name Lydia?” Eric asked.

“No. She was christened just Lydie. L-y-d-i-e.”

Each letter, as the man uttered it in his appealingly cadenced voice, was a caress. There could be no doubt that he worshiped his wife. She was, Eric reflected, probably a big-bosomed, generous person who would be dismayed at nothing, not even Chopin. He sat down and ran his fingers over the keys in a few bars of a currently popular melody. Andrew Clarence did not move, nor did he speak a word. But Eric paused midway in a phrase, acutely aware that the man’s eyes were upon him in silent protest.

He turned slowly and bowed. “I beg your pardon,” he said rather stiffly. “I merely wanted to hear the tone.”

“It has rather a good tone, I think,” Andrew Clarence said, and went to place a log on the fire. Eric observed how deft and slender his hands were, the brown wrists flexible as a woman’s. The feeling of chagrin still lingered annoyingly and he made a determined effort to shake it off. He got up and went to the other side of the room, where his coat hung near the door. He reached into his pocket, then hesitated. “Do you mind if I smoke? I mean—would your wife mind?”

A reproachful smile passed lightly across Clarence’s thin face, and Eric was nettled by the man’s evident misunderstanding of his question. He had read sarcasm into it where none had been intended.

“Not at all, Mr. Stene,” said Andrew Clarence. “We are rather civilized here, my wife and I. Lydie smokes occasionally herself, if only to make her guests feel more comfortable.” As he spoke he opened a small cabinet on a table beside the couch and drew out a briar pipe.

At what precise moment he became freed of the sense of baffling restraint and discomfort in the company of Andrew Clarence, Eric could not subsequently have told. But since he talked with him there altogether for not more than half an hour, the man’s effortless, intangible magnetism must have acted upon him almost at once. Eric found himself darting covert glances at Clarence while his host talked in a slow, desultory fashion, using phrases that would have been, in a voice less rich and winning, the tritest of platitudes. The man’s charm was exasperating, unanalyzable. Was it in his voice, in the classic, ascetic modeling of his head with its skein of gray through the silky dark hair, in the sensitive, long line of mouth beneath the aristocratic, sharply flanged nose, in the brooding, almost animal-like softness of the deep-set brown eyes, or was it in the eloquent, controlled power of his hands—hands that spoke of a profound humanity in the spirit of the man, of mercy and a sublime tolerance? Andrew Clarence should have been an actor or a priest, Eric thought. What strange impulse had ever moved him to take up farming?

Their conversation touched upon matters commonplace enough: the economic outlook for the country, and for the farmer in particular. Clarence spoke briefly of his efforts to specialize, and the problem of carrying on the routine work of the farm at the same time. His own interest lay in Jersey cattle, while that of his wife was in peonies.

“The two are worlds apart,” he admitted, “but we both feel that it is better to vary your hazards. It keeps you sufficiently occupied to insure your sanity in a world where sanity seems to be on the decline.”

“Very interesting,” Eric observed. “I can understand now your wanting to buy the place. If you were settled more permanently, at least that hazard would disappear.”

“Just so,” Clarence replied eagerly. “I had hoped you would see it in that light.”

“I do. And I should like to think, for the sake of what you are doing, that the arrangement might be reached some day. But the fact is, I have decided to give up teaching and I have been toying with the idea of taking the place over myself and seeing what I could do with it.” Then, noticing Clarence’s anxious glance, he added, “Not for some time, of course. Certainly not for two or three years, anyhow.”

“I am glad to hear that,” Clarence said, and got up abruptly. “By the way, your grandfather’s books and journals are on the top floor, just as he left them. My wife keeps the place in order, you will find, and we have furnished the small adjoining room as a spare bedroom. I hope you will be comfortable there for as long as you wish to stay.”

Eric was astonished. “I haven’t really decided upon anything definite. But—thank you, just the same. You seem to take things very much for granted.”

Andrew Clarence smiled gently. “There is an old Arabic adage to the effect that when a camel sees an oasis his eyes close. I may be mistaken, of course, but—” he made a deprecatory gesture—“my feeling was that you would want to stop here a while. I have decided that you belong here, and it would be a great pleasure to me—to us, I should say—to have your company for a while.”

It was oddly disturbing. The pedantic striving for the correct turn of speech would have, in anyone else, either bored Eric or made him want to laugh. But the artless sincerity of Andrew Clarence reduced everything else about him to the negligible.

“Well,” Eric said haltingly, “that’s very kind of you. I don’t really deserve such cordiality. I might have written to you, but I—”

“We don’t stand on ceremony here,” Clarence smiled. “I am glad you have come. If I were a literary man myself, I should have been tempted long ago to assemble your grandfather’s memoirs up there and make something of them.”

He lifted his head and fixed Eric with his direct, glowing and challenging eyes. This was something you could not exactly dismiss as accidental guess-work. Was it possible that the man had read those few articles of his in an obscure magazine?

He was about to speak when Clarence said hurriedly, “I am very sorry, but I shall have to leave you now. Our meeting is at eight.” It was his first direct reference to this evidently self-assumed obligation. He held out his hand and in his grip there was a vitality beyond mere physical strength, although that in itself was surprising in a man so slight. “Make yourself at home, Mr. Stene. I shall probably not be back until quite late.”