Читать книгу The Mandrake Root - Martha Ostenso - Страница 4

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There was no lonelier smell in all the world, Lydie Clarence thought, than that of old, matted straw on a rainy November afternoon. She pitched the last forkful down from the truck into the wheelbarrow, and then pushed the barrow alongside the last row of the two-acre peony bed, where the stake bore the name Christine Cardle. Over each plant an armful of straw had to be snugly tamped down, beneath which—throughout the blind, white sleep of winter—the precious magic of life would be working in a little brown bulb, the slow upward toiling toward summer loveliness.

Lydie lifted the handles of the empty barrow, but did not at once start back to the truck beside the willow trees. Her gaze drifted broodingly over the straw-dotted field, where the rain was a silvery swaying curtain now. She shivered a little, for the collar of her leather jacket was wet and her khaki overalls were clammy about her legs. But she was scarcely conscious of any discomfort, so absorbed was she in the odd notion that had just come to her. Was it possible for a person to be jealous in a way out of the common, jealous of the farm animals, the orchard, the fields, these flowers the cultivation of which was her own small enterprise—all of these sure and unfrustrated things, forever renewing themselves in the mystery of birth? She believed that it was possible. Secretly veined through her tenderness for them was a bitter resentment that they should be so freely given the wonder she herself was denied.

Looking to the east, she saw her husband, Andrew, walking upward from the low-lying field where alfalfa had been this year and where wheat would be next. The yellow collie, Shag, was at his heels. Andrew had been repairing the fence that enclosed the field, and while she had been spreading straw here the sound of his sledge hammer driving in the posts had come to her through the still and rain-burdened air. It had been sweet, the rhythmic thud of his heavy man-work blending with the light, patient whisper of her own. So she had told herself, knowing the while that the sweetness was empty—empty as a weasel-plundered nest.

She watched Andrew moving upward from the low land to the crest of the hill where the farmstead stood within its rainy, somber grove. It occurred to her that a man could look small in a valley and yet large when he stood on a height with the sky behind him. That was how Andrew should stand always, she thought with an odd, limping throb of her heart; for he had greatness in him, and was not meant to be folded anonymous as a seed into the palm of this earth.

Earth, moreover, that did not belong to him, but to a landlord who possessed it through the effortless grace of inheritance—one, Eric Stene, whom neither Lydie nor Andrew had ever met, since the rental had been negotiated through an agent. Photographs of this Eric Stene had come to light, however, in the Stene family effects Lydie had consigned to the attic of the big house five years ago when she and Andrew had assumed the tenancy. The latest of those photographs—bearing a self-conscious inscription, “To Granduncle Johannes Stene”—presented a handsome blond youth in cap and gown, direct and faintly disapproving of eye, stern of jaw, and rather too sensuous of mouth. A hypocritical young prig, Lydie had decided then and there, recalling from her own public school days the newspaper stories she had read about Eric Stene, the model college student. Not only had he been crowned with athletic honors, but as president of his class he had been unanimously elected to the title of “leading moral spirit of the school.” The earlier photographs, of a snub-nosed, rather wistful little boy, had caused Lydie to linger, for they had promised a man with likable faults and virtues that had somehow not survived to appear in that last picture of smug self-esteem. The subject, she had reflected in all fairness, might have become more human since that graduation photograph had been taken. He had certainly left them alone in their tenancy and in that respect, at least, had proven himself an ideal landlord. Even so, she had no desire to meet Eric Stene. Such righteousness, such self-complacency would take one a lifetime to eradicate.

Her thoughts of Andrew blazed up defensively above those of the man whose land he tilled. In vain had Andrew tried to come to some arrangement by which he could purchase, through modest payments, even a half of this quarter section which had once belonged to Doctor Edvard Stene, the grandfather of the handsome young Eric. But the agent had quoted pompously from the letter he had received. “For reasons of sentiment, and for such reasons only, the land is not for sale....” That had been two years ago, when Lydie and Andrew had already begun to feel that this, by some natural and immutable law, was their place.

Andrew had not permitted his disappointment to dampen in any way the devotion he gave to his work. Only sometimes, if he sat before the fire of an evening, Lydie resting on a hassock beside him with her head against his knees, he would run his gentle, roughened fingers thoughtfully through her hair and say, “Maybe the place will be ours yet. We’re still young, Lydie—we can wait.”

It always brought an ache for him into her throat, a sore mutinousness not only against this matter of the land, but against all the treachery life had dealt him. She would draw his hand down quickly to her lips then, and although she might be unable to speak a word of what she felt she could sense the revitalized hope in his tensed body. At such times her protective love for him would flow over her in a bright, strong tide of warmth that drowned the crying voices of the dark cave within her deepest being.

Andrew had passed from sight now into the grove, the great hemlocks and pines at the entrance gate taking him into themselves as into an island night upon the filmy blue sea of evening. Lydie stood waiting for him to reappear beneath the naked elms closer to the house, and found herself seized with an irrational urgency to see him emerge and come again into full view. But the elms stood there unchanged by any figure moving under them—as they had stood unchanged for half a century, save for their own secret change with the seasons. Now, in their time, they were the gray and rain-shrouded bones of autumn striking their gaunt tableau against the cold sky.

Lydie pressed the back of her hand desperately to her mouth. She had been whispering, without sense or reason, “Andrew, Andrew—come out of that darkness!”

A sound on the roadway beyond the willows restored her to her long-practiced, unrevealing calm.

There were two women in the automobile that had come to a halt there, and one of them was calling to Lydie in a shrill, almost fretful voice. Lydie pushed the wheelbarrow over to the truck and left it standing under a clump of brush. Then she stepped out into the roadway and smiled a greeting to the women in the car.

“Hello, Esther! And—Guri! Is it really you? I can’t believe it. I haven’t seen you in a dog’s age!”

The old woman who sat beside Esther Larch in the car had a face so stitched with wrinkles that her features seemed to be merely a brown, perplexing ruching. But when she was pleased, her little nose always twitched comically and gave one a clue to the puzzle. As Andrew had said once, “Old Guri Kvam’s nose is a weather vane.”

At her younger brother’s farm, on every third of June, there was always a celebration of old Guri’s birthday; this because in the beginning she had been the youngest woman in the district and she was now the oldest. She was in her eighty-seventh year, and a widow for the past decade. Her sons and daughters, to her immense scorn, had gone off to towns and cities where, she vowed, not a dratted one of ’em would ever live to see threescore and ten. Although she had come to America when she was twenty, she still spoke with the broad, humorous accent that had followed her from Sognfjord. For a long time the pioneers had been isolated from all but their mother tongue. Sometimes Guri remembered the “th” she had spent arduous hours in mastering; and the altogether unnecessary distinction between a “v” and a “w,” a “j” and a “y.” Oftener she didn’t.

She nodded radiantly beneath the black knitted scarf that covered her head. “Ya, I come for coffee, so you iss not too bissy! Esther, she say I got to come wit’, when she stop by our place. So I come.”

Esther Larch, leaning forward across the old woman’s knees, said with petulant haste, “I have to talk to Andrew about the meeting Thursday, Lydie. I didn’t want to phone, with half the county listening in on every word a person says. Is Andrew up at the house?”

Lydie compassionately observed the results of Esther’s effort to make herself attractive for this visit with Andrew. The girl was in her mid-twenties, only a year or so older than Lydie, but her clay-colored hair, coquettishly frizzled by curling tongs and yet already limp about her long, tallow-dull cheeks, and her pale blue, nervously bulging eyes, gave her the desperate look of a woman whose youth was on the wane and the objective of her sex still unreached. Poor Andrew, Lydie thought, and berated herself for the cruel, secret amusement she felt at the spectacle of this fatuous, unhappy girl and her hopeless enslavement. Andrew himself had been amused, at first—until he had become bored and finally annoyed.

“You’ll probably find him up there, Esther,” Lydie replied in her kindliest manner. “I saw him, a little while ago, up by the elms. You drive on to the house and I’ll come up right away.”