Читать книгу The Mandrake Root - Martha Ostenso - Страница 16

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Alone in the room, Eric pondered at length upon Andrew Clarence. He was only a little above medium height, but his erect carriage gave him the appearance of greater stature. In his presence, you did not see the exterior man at all—the shabby-neat dark clothes, the ill-fitting shirt collar about the long, sensitive neck, the limp and faded necktie that had plainly been laundered. You thought of these things only afterwards.

Clarence was certainly not unmasculine. His electric, buoyant force could come only from a well-balanced condition of mind and body. And yet, there was about him something unfamiliar and undeniably disquieting, a superior gentleness, a sober patience which one ordinarily associated with a compassionate and broad-hearted woman. It occurred to Eric that Clarence was not unlike Sibert Mueller. In some respects that likable and innocently charitable man had also been unfamiliar to him, always. Perhaps it was that both Clarence and Mueller shared in common an hallucination of a universal and ultimate Good, in the face of all evidence to the contrary.

Instead of going upstairs immediately, Eric stood looking at the bowl of everlastings, chaste and rigid, under the lamp on the maple table. His thoughts were in disorder, his feelings at odds. His grandfather had lived to see this house magically lighted from the power line out of Inglebrook. And long afterwards a woman had deftly arranged these demure flowers under a light, to last throughout a winter, throughout winters. Andrew Clarence’s wife, whose name was Lydie. Either a tub or a lath of a woman, probably, who would play the organ in the country church on Sundays and on these frenzied Thursday nights when her husband charmed the moon-faced gathering into a blubbering, hysterical faith in existence by the simple device of being himself. Saint Paul had done it in any number of unlikely places on the Mediterranean, centuries ago, without the aid of a wife.

Eric stood for a moment before the table, then snapped off one of the prim, unscented flowers and drew it through the buttonhole of his lapel. He smiled as he saluted the room, but he was grave when he said, “À vous, Madame Lydie! May your offspring flourish in this, the house of my birth!”

Then he turned slowly away and went upstairs.