Читать книгу The Young May Moon - Martha Ostenso - Страница 3

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This long trestle that hung darkly between the stars and their drowned images in the spring flood below marked the halfway point between Bethune and Amaranth. Seven miles yet to go.

Her footsteps echoed bizarrely over the bridge. Like a dog barking in a well, sharp and hollow. It cheered you to think things like that. For a moment you forgot to be afraid. But her fear only grew; it became terror. The echoes were hollow voices out of the past, following from below, close upon her heels. For it was here that Hugh Vorse, the drunken section-boss who was her father, had lost his life and caused the loss of two other lives as well. Death does not soon forsake its haunt, she knew. She tried to run to escape the sound, but fatigue caught at her body, and the baying voices mocked her. She had come too far from Bethune, running and stumbling over the railway track in this strange white darkness so possessed of stars, to run any more.

Darkness possessed of stars—it was rather to the ceaseless clamor of wild fowl that the night belonged. Wings whistling against the sky, plump bodies rushing downward to meet the water, hungry foragers scuttling somberly among the weft of shore sedge—and always, always, that broken cry filling the air and keeping the night alive.

Had it not been for the fear of meeting someone, Marcia would have taken the gravel road that lay through brush and prairie between the two towns. She had gone that way earlier in the night when she had ridden up to Bethune in the fiddler’s van. Three Ruthenians, on their way to a dance in Bethune, had halted on the road and asked her to ride with them. They had given her only a dark look or two and had left her quite to herself in the back of the van. Nor had they spoken a word when she got down before the box-shaped section-house that stood hard by the track, the sight of which had been like a rush of cold water over her inflamed spirit.

It was the sight of that house standing under the white starlight, its familiar doorway and the steps in front where her father used to sit and smoke in the summer evenings, its homely square windows in which she had set sweet peas to flower in early spring, its gentle roof under which she had lain and listened to the rush of the rain—it was this that had made her turn back. And it was this, too, that had made her choose to go back by way of the railroad, lest someone passing might see her—and wonder. No one, either in Bethune or in Amaranth, must know that Rolf Gunther’s wife had run away from him. Rather than have Rolf—proud, sensitive, inscrutable Rolf Gunther—suffer that humiliation, she would crawl back every foot of the way on hands and knees, slinking home like a hunted animal. Now, no one would know, no one except Rolf and herself, and they would strive to forget.

Terror gripped her as again, for the hundredth time since she had started upon this dolorous journey, the enormity of what she had done came over her. She must have been mad, cruelly, immeasurably mad. That empty, flat pasture, lying on the edge of Bethune, strange under night-depth as only pasture land can be strange, had brought down upon her the full sense of her madness. Presences, there where the little, deep-rutted road emerged from the brushland at the edge of the pasture, had spoken to her out of the silence. The dim presence, maybe, of old Hugh Vorse, himself so sorely come to disaster; of her own lonely childhood in those fields, become legend now with the legends of the past; of Rolf Gunther, who had walked with her there on an October evening only a season ago, in some enchantment forever dispelled.

Forever? No—no, not forever!

She had come to the end of the trestle at last and the barking echoes ceased. Her heart lightened. After all, this was only a nightmare that would be completely dissolved when she crept into Rolf’s arms again and asked his forgiveness. And he, large and harassed and angry, inarticulate because of what she had done, would relent at last, then gather her close, close, where she wanted to be. Oh, he would! Had he not always forgiven her!

In the end, perhaps—she dared to think it—this reckless thing she had done might yield its good. Perhaps it would restore to them the lost magic of those days in Bethune where Rolf had found her fighting to live down her father’s disgrace. Perhaps it would. Stranger things than that had happened, if you could believe what you read in books. And yet—she struck her breast in vain self-questioning. With Dorcas Gunther, Rolf’s fanatically religious mother in the house—or they, rather, in Dorcas Gunther’s house—would enchantment ever hold them again?

Marcia began to run, in effect only dragging her feet over the rough ground. She was overcome suddenly with the sensation of pitching headlong. She could go no farther. The strength had left her limbs. Tongues of unnatural heat were leaping up over her body. She sank down upon the edge of the pebbly bank, her breath sobbing out of lungs and throat that seemed lined with sand.

She sank heavily across the rail, her body full of the sore trembling of utter exhaustion. Her ear lay against the cold steel so that she could hear the thin singing in it. How often as a child she had lain so, listening with delicious terror to the hum that told her of a train rushing, rushing toward her from beyond that naked curve where the earth cut into the sky. There would probably be a freight train along soon, she thought dully. None had passed her since she left Bethune. She would have to get off the track then, down the side of the grade to the edge of the ditches filled with flood-water. But for the moment it was good to lie here, to rest and think of Rolf—the Rolf of the Bethune days, of course, whose shining image had somehow misted over during the past months, as do the fables that make up the creed of a child.

What had happened to the Rolf Gunther she had known and loved in that sorrow-sweet fall of the year when she was just past twenty? Had it been merely that his mother, Dorcas, had taken him back into herself, that jealous and austere self that had so abhorred an interloper? Or had it been something else, something deeper, something within Rolf’s own soul that she had never quite been able to understand?

Abject creature-weariness pinned her to the ground. She wondered, listlessly, why she should be so tired. Had those endless winter months in Dorcas Gunther’s house spent her spirit utterly? She had done her best to shape her life to theirs. She had no need to be reminded that her father had been the drunken free-thinker of Bethune. She had followed Rolf’s leading until she had learned gradually what was expected of her. She had gone to church with Dorcas. She had even embraced the ordeal of conversion ... “Her sinful heart has yielded to the voice of the Holy Spirit!” old Dorcas Gunther had cried aloud before the whole congregation. Dorcas had praised the Lord then. And Rolf had murmured, “Praise the Lord!” too, in response to his mother’s words. And Marcia had risen to her feet there and stood alone—dear God in Heaven, how heart-brokenly alone!—between her strong young husband and his frail old mother, and tried to speak but that her tears forbade her.

Thereafter, throughout the dreary winter, she had sat among the singers in the choir loft and wondered much about what Dorcas had meant when she had spoken of a consecrated voice. Had her voice been different, then, when she had gone singing through the brushland and the pasture outside Bethune? Had there been no God to listen to her when she sang the songs her father had taught her in the long winter evenings when they were alone together in the big room in the section-house?

Oh, Rolf—Rolf! She folded her arms down beneath her face and called his name softly to herself, from utter loneliness.

It was only when she thought of what had happened between them the evening before that her spirit flamed up and made her almost forget her weariness. How could Rolf have been such a fool! She had wanted so little, it seemed to her. She had asked only for his love, his real love—not the secret, somehow shamed desire he had rarely enough shown her. She had asked for love, then. She had never asked another man for that. She had never wanted to. Other men had offered love to her, but she could not take where she could not give. Howard Masterson, who came down from Bethune on Thursday nights to train the choir, had offered his love a year ago, before she had met Rolf. But she had waited—waited until Rolf Gunther had come to her, because she knew she could love Rolf Gunther.

What was it he had said there among the poplars where they had walked at sundown only last evening? She had scarcely heard him at first, so low he had spoken, as if he had been talking to himself rather. “You will never understand ... you will never understand. Perhaps I can never tell you ... a man’s wife, Marcia, is something more than—something more than flesh. A man’s wife is—”

She had broken in upon him then. How vividly she recalled the whole, heart-breaking, baffling scene! Her own voice rang back to her, as she had challenged him, scornful and wild, her face flung upward so that the whole sky was in her eyes; she had felt it burning in them, sapphire, and cruel as only loveliness can be cruel. And ah!—there, over her left shoulder, with a thrill of fear and beauty, she had seen the tender crescent of the young May moon! Over her left shoulder—a luckless moon. The poet’s song grown bitter.

“A man’s wife! I’m not made to be that kind of wife, Rolf! I’m tired of being a saint. I want to be loved—to have a lover, Rolf. I want you for my lover.”

She had seized his hands, forcing his frowning eyes to her own. About them the tiny new poplar leaves had shaken like silver coins. Above them a star had come out, one, then two, pale and weak in the proud color of the sky. And still, destroyingly beautiful, had hung that silver slender spur of the moon of May! When he did not answer her she had gone on and on....

“I’ve lived all winter with ghosts, Rolf. I can’t go on with it. Now you must listen to me. I want more and more of life, Rolf—not denial. I must tell you this, dear—I must! Can’t you see it all for yourself—as I see it? I can’t go on living with your mother. I loathe—I loathe her vicious denial of life. Oh, I know she is a good woman, Rolf, and she is your mother—but I’m telling you that I shall loathe her unless you take me away from her. I can’t stand her sense of sin any longer—I can’t because I’ve never understood it. I never shall understand it. And I don’t want to be old, Rolf, I want to be young with you. Please, Rolf! Look at me—look at me! Take me in your arms—now—out here—under the sky—as though—as though nothing mattered in all the world except our love, Rolf. Dearest—dear—kiss me—”

He had swayed a little toward her, like some blond warrior wounded and dreadful. He had put forth his hands as though he would have taken her uplifted face between them. Then his shoulders had grown rigid. He had smiled and let one hand rest lightly on her hair, almost as if he were asking her to forgive him for something.

“I think—I can never tell you—so that you will know what I mean. Let us go back to the house now, Marcia.”

Some perverse devil had possessed her then. Nothing else could have made her taunt him with the name of Howard Masterson. She wanted to strike him standing there so cool and resolute above her. He would only have smiled at that, of course, and stood there still. But at the mention of Howard Masterson’s name he had gone white, slag-gray—there was no color to describe his face. It had gone stone dead, save for the eyes. In their tawny gold lived the stricken terror of an animal. That look had made her glad, insanely glad. A terror-stricken animal will fight. Rolf, with that look in his eyes, would fight for her, fight to keep her, if only—she would tell him that Howard Masterson wanted her, had always wanted her—and was waiting for her to go to him. It would rouse him to madness ... it would awaken something within him, set something free....

But it had done nothing of the kind. She could not bear to think now of those eyes of his, following her when she had turned and left him. Rolf—Rolf! Had it been nerve-weariness—oh, who could tell what it was, really, that prompted a human being to commit such monstrous folly! If he had only reassured her—even a little.

She could not bear to think of his voice now, heavy, dully challenging. “You won’t go away—to him, Marcia!” Over and over again. “You won’t go away—to him!”

If he had only caught her up to him instead, and all but crushed her life out! But he had let her turn from him, let her stumble blindly away, groping, running, not knowing where she must go—but that she must not look back....

It would not do to lie here any longer. As it was, she would be home only an hour or so before dawn. Perhaps Rolf would be out looking for her, thinking she had not really meant to go.

She stood up, then paused for a moment, resisting desperately a black surge of oblivion, an exquisite languor that pulled her down. Her mind seemed to clear abruptly. The purpled rim of the horizon lifted about her. The stars pointed down, blanched and unnaturally near.

She started once more toward Amaranth.

From near the town came the whistle of a freight train, a long-drawn, melancholy sound loping in echoes over and over the prairie to the outer source of darkness. How stark and simple night was, stripping the soul of false courage, manacling it, naked, to a shadow and whispering into its ears, like a whimsy, its few and direful truths.

A short distance more and she made her way down the pebbly grade to the shelter of a clump of dogwood and waited while the freight train passed—a solemn creature, she thought, lonely and cumbersome and panting as a decrepit dragon. How she had loved the plodding freight trains in the old days, and the patient red box cars waiting on the sidetracks in Bethune.

She climbed back up the grade, fatigue all but overpowering her. The balls of her feet flamed. Pain, like a demon, whipped at her shoulders and the back of her neck. But she could not give up here. Even after she reached home again, anything approaching collapse would be an alluring luxury which she must sternly deny herself. Dorcas Gunther must never learn of her folly. There would be some way to hide it from her. Rolf, she knew, would not have told his mother yet. His sensitive pride would prevent that. No, no—this night would forever remain a secret between Rolf and herself. He could forgive, he could be generous, but Dorcas—never.

She had to struggle merely to keep her footing. Now and then tears gathered, but she was insensible to them until they fell, large and cold and startling, upon her burning cheeks. Once, abruptly, she came abreast of a heap of glowing embers beside a little creek that elbowed in toward the track. With fear-shrewd eyes she saw the forms of two or three tramps apparently sleeping about the fire. Ordinarily these casual denizens of summer would not have alarmed her. Now she walked stiffly on tiptoe until the campfire was sheathed over by distance.

Terror and joy swept her alternately. Her terror was a nameless thing, quite apart from any apprehensiveness she held concerning Rolf’s reception of her when she returned. Her joy was an unreasoning thing that sent her running breathlessly through the dark like a truant child, running for shelter, for sanctuary, into the arms of the only living being she loved. Rolf Gunther—sanctuary? Her mind fluttered timidly away from that question. It was better, she had found on this mad night, to love than to be loved. She would learn to ask no more.

The town lay before her, at last, a faint star caught in the net of the misted valley. Like a scimitar of smoky silver the river curved about the flats, at the limits of the town. She would descend to the river and keep well into the fields until she neared home.

Once, before leaving the railway tracks, she looked behind her. Somewhere back there, where her feet had left their imprint in the soft ground, or where the stars glimmered out of the sky, lay her last folly, like the cap of youth.

She turned away and went down toward the town.