Читать книгу The Young May Moon - Martha Ostenso - Страница 4

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The town slept with the resigned and trustful sleep of the very young and the very old. From the edge of the meadow land that bordered it on one side, Marcia could look down and see the two rows of lights, like a thinly studded cross, that marked the only two paved streets in Amaranth.

There was the meadow land to traverse now, before she could reach the slim white Lutheran church, with its six lean box-elder trees, standing so serenely there at the edge of the town. The dew was heavy on the sweet-grass in the meadow; it washed delicately at her skirts, drenching her shoes and stockings. The smell of sweet-grass belonged to the unutterably stirring things of life: to the memory of her mother, back beyond the all but forgotten years, singing, “Sweet and low, sweet and low, Wind of the western sea ...”; to the memory of a night in early winter when she was twelve years old and had seen a hare, listening in the moonlight, on new-fallen snow; and to the sound of the autumn wind on the prairie. The scent stole over her like an exquisite nostalgia, the piercing intimation, only, of a longing for the unknown.

It was ironical, she reflected, that she should have chosen a route home that would oblige her to pass two churches, the Lutheran, with its bleak little graveyard where the first pioneers, Germans and Scandinavians, slept; and the Baptist, Dorcas Gunther’s church, with its gray stone tower. She had to pass the house of Hector Aldous, too, the town banker, who owned half of Amaranth—and every one of its few hundred souls. The dew-saturated plumes of lilacs leaned from the Aldous hedge and touched her face; if they had only known, she thought, they would have drawn back from her as she passed. On the Aldous lawn the spiræa bushes whitened; the lawn itself, terraced and green, was smooth as the coil of a great wave.

There was a breathlessness about the street where the tall elms, meeting, appeared always to clasp their hands in piety. At the upper end, where the avenue rose against the hillside, stood the small theological school that had given the street its name. That was why people called it College Avenue, to distinguish it from that other paved thoroughfare, which it intersected, and which was known as Lundy Street, because Herb Lundy’s store stood on the corner.

Down there, a little more than a block from the intersection, Marcia could see the tiny light that burned all night above Doctor Paul Brule’s doorway. Her eyes narrowed with obscure emotion as they glimpsed the light burning there with its steady, deliberate indifference. Doctor Paul, Rolf’s best friend, disliked all women. She had sensed his dislike of her from the first time she had met him. If he were to find out about this night’s recklessness he would only despise her the more, in ironical silence without comment. Her fingers crumpled convulsively as she thought of him. As Rolf’s friend he might have helped them both. Rolf worshipped Doctor Paul.

One more block still, and then around the corner to the left—just twenty-eight paces to the gate before Dorcas Gunther’s house. How often she had counted those steps! It had become a foolish habit which she had been powerless to break. She counted them now, each step an effort of despair. She grasped the pointed pickets at last and paused a moment to steady herself. Somehow, she must open that gate, with its frightful, tiny squeak like the cry of a startled mouse. That gate made of anyone a trespasser.

She was, unbelievably, through the gateway, treading on the soft lawn at the edge of the concrete walk, her eyes fixed upon the house. There was no light in the house. The dark Virginia creeper hung over the front of it, like a mask over a white face, the black eyes of the upper windows staring out from above. For a fleeting instant she had the singular conviction that there was nothing whatever in that house—that it was stark empty. The notion struck coldly upon her mind. It was moments before she could summon the courage to tiptoe up the veranda steps and with shaking fingers try the door.

What if the door were locked against her? But no—Rolf would never do that. Dorcas would do that—if she knew. But the old woman had gone to bed before Marcia and Rolf had left the house. Dorcas had two rooms of her own, her sitting room and her bedroom, both on the first floor, at the back of the house. She would never know whether anyone went out of the house, or came into it. Marcia caught the small knob of the screen door and tried it gently. It moved and the door swung open with a light twang of its wire spring. There on the porch, almost hidden in the shadows, was Dorcas’s big chair where she had sat for a while before going to her room. Marcia looked at it as if she were surprised to find it there. It seemed so long since she had seen it last.

There was little danger of Dorcas hearing anyone entering quietly at the front door, even if she had been a light sleeper. But to Marcia, groping her way up the stairs, with their narrow strip of worn carpet, it seemed that every step woke shouting echoes through the house. She would find Rolf in their room, sitting before the window, probably, as he sometimes sat when he found it impossible to sleep. He would have heard her enter—unless—

Her pulses throbbed into a riot of uncertainty. At the landing she pressed against the balustrade for a moment to compose herself. She opened the door of their room. She did not have to call to discover that there was no one there. The dreadful volume of its silence, its emptiness, hurled itself upon her, crushing inward at her breast, and then withdrew into the room, disdainful, hard, unanswering.

The door made a foolish, bright “snick” behind her, as she entered and closed it too abruptly. The sound frightened her, but of course Dorcas could not have heard it. She crept farther into the room, removing her coat with icy hands. She would have to lie down for a minute or two, until the pain in her shoulders and limbs eased a little.

She lay face downward on the bed, her arms gathering the pillows involuntarily, her fingers plucking at them. The objects in the room met her feverish, roving eyes with an obstinate assertiveness projecting out of that blue and black plaited darkness that comes just before dawn. The furniture had taken on the dingy and abandoned look of things in a murky back room of a second-hand shop. The place was unbearable. She sat up and removed her shoes, found her soft-soled bedroom slippers, and drew them on.

She could not go on sitting there gazing at the window. She got up and opened the door quietly, then moved into the hall where she stood listening. She heard only the loud beating of her own heart. Groping her way downstairs again, she went to the door of Dorcas Gunther’s room and listened without drawing a breath. Only the sound of the old woman’s deep, slightly sonorous breathing came to her.

She drew back rigidly from the door, passing through the little hall that led to the dining room and thence to the living room, an alcove of which constituted Rolf’s study. Rolf had once dreamed of becoming a minister. It had been his mother’s fond ambition for him. But old man Gunther had died before Rolf had completed his courses, and the boy had taken over the small lumber business his father had built up during the years he had lived in Amaranth. Dorcas Gunther had bowed humbly to God’s will.

Marcia moved silently through the rooms, fumbling past the furniture, her eyes seeking out each familiar object, as though here, or here, Rolf might conceivably be found, sitting or standing in the darkness, in his habitual vast, inarticulate silence. It was absurd to expect that she could find him in such a manner, she told herself desperately as she halted before the deep chair that stood by his walnut desk in the alcove. She ran her fingers along the back of the chair; the hard, smooth wood was a cold rebuff. Suddenly a sob rose uncontrollably in her body, pressing intolerably out of breast and throat. She fled into the front hallway and made her way once more up the narrow stairs.

Removing her dress, she wrapped herself in a kimono and lay down again. She tried to think of where Rolf might have gone. Tramping the fields, probably, or sitting all night long with Paul Brule. It had been nothing but her own vanity that had prompted the thought that he might have gone to Bethune—to find Howard Masterson. She could not think that now. She had no vanity left. She lay shuddering until again that wave of fatigue swept over her like a drug.

The fading darkness breathed upon her like the night-terrors of childhood. Rolf would come in by dawn. She would hear him come up the stairway with his groping step. He never became accustomed to stairways, even in a half-light, no matter how often he had gone up and down them; it was an eccentricity of his of which she had grown fond during the few months she had known him. Perhaps she should have guarded against such sentimentality. There was no place for such in the house of Dorcas Gunther.... He would come in by dawn, and his eyes would search hers with that appealing, trapped look the very memory of which was an excruciating twist in her heart. If he had only been able, or willing, to talk to her sometimes, to unburden himself of the harrowing complexities of his spirit! Once or twice he had seemed to be on the verge of revealing himself to her, and then some gloomy inhibition had intervened. His solemnity sat grotesquely upon the beauty of his body, upon the illumined splendor of his face. It was like a somber cloud following and beshading with relentless fidelity some bright, running stream of the earth.

Her eyes were wide and burning now. She was staring at the window where the light was growing ashen. The stars were withering out of the sky. A cool, wet wind, freighted with the smell of lilac, took its precious passage through the open window, and touched upon her cheeks and hot temples. The window held her eyes fascinated. Soon a gaping whiteness would fill the room, sudden and strong and yet impalpable, and that would be day.

Fear seized her so that her teeth chattered crazily. Why in God’s name could she not weep, before her throat split with tears? With a writhing, tempestuous motion she turned away from the window. On the wall above her bed, visible now in the gray light, hung the framed motto which Dorcas Gunther had embroidered and placed there, its two flaming words worked in red wool against a white background—“Repent Ye!”

Her slowly mounting fear, with its moments of retarding reassurance had suddenly become panic. A dozen explanations of Rolf’s failure to return were each and all in sickening succession dispelled by the reminder that for Dorcas’s sake, if for no other, he would have come back before dawn, had he been able to come. Would this intolerable waiting, this agonized wondering never come to an end?

She got from her bed and walked frantically about the room, pausing only to stare out of the window, to listen with straining ears at the door. Long, pale ribbons of lavender and flushed gray were unfurling through the garden. The oaks and elms were crested with liquid metals that dropped down and lay like thin bright flakes within the dark bosom of the trees.

Dorcas would be stirring soon. She rose always shortly after daylight, from long habit established in a sense of moral duty. This, of all mornings, Marcia thought, would find the old woman out of bed at a needlessly early hour, rousing the house with the sounds of her resolute, if difficult, endeavors. Rolf always left for the lumber-yard at eight. There would have to be some plausible story to tell Dorcas now. Marcia would have to practise some deception in order to gain time....

There was movement in the house below. Dorcas had risen and was going about the kitchen.

Marcia hastily donned a house dress, her hands shaking unmanageably. She must not go on like this, she told herself, if she were to face Dorcas at all. She seated herself before her mirror and stared at her white face, the infinitesimal tracings of red remaining high in her cheeks, where her vivid color usually was; her eyes were bottomless black wells, the blue crowded out of them almost entirely. She uncoiled the black mass of her hair, that had become so wildly dishevelled. She would wash with cold water, do up her hair quickly, and go down to Dorcas with lips ready to frame the deception. She would tell the old woman anything, if need be, to keep her from asking questions. Later, if Rolf did not come—she put that thought from her with determination. If he did not come at once, she would hurry out of the house, on any pretext whatsoever, and go to Doctor Paul Brule.

Dorcas was bustling about the kitchen with all the appearance of haste she usually displayed in the preparation of a meal for her son. As Marcia entered, it struck her with a pang of intolerable irony that there might not be any necessity for haste. What was this black fear that persisted in haunting her now? She fought it off once more, realizing that it could be nothing more than the result of her nerve-shattering experience of the night.

The wizened, narrow back of the old woman, rigid as a wooden effigy in the stiffly starched, gray calico dress, was turned toward Marcia. Dorcas was stirring something in a saucepan on the range, the great coal range that was kept going day and night, in summer and winter. She did not turn, even to bid Marcia good morning. She would not. To Dorcas, the preparing of food superseded everything else in importance. To the angular lines of her mother-in-law’s back, Marcia said, “Goodness, you are up early, mother!”

A withered shelf of chin showed over Dorcas’s shoulder. The tight coil of hair at the back of her head revealed dark streaks, as a faded garment will show its original color in its seams.

“Rolf said last night that he had to be up early to meet that man from over Bass Lake way,” she replied plaintively. “He’s up, isn’t he?”

Marcia feigned a sigh. “Really, mother, it’s quite unnecessary for you to get up so early,” she said. “Surely I can—”

But Dorcas interrupted curtly. “I’ve done for Rolf for thirty years and it won’t send me to my grave any sooner to do for him now.”

Behind the woman’s back, Marcia closed her eyes with a sudden faint feeling. Dorcas was talking on, her voice, high and querulous, chipping at her words. “Not but what I’d have enjoyed an extra forty winks this morning, if it comes to that. I spent a bad night of it. Rolf said he’d fix the leak in that tap for the garden hose—just outside my window. He must have forgotten all about it. All night long, that steady drip, drip, drip on the cement walk just about drove me wild. I s’pose I could have got up and closed the window, but I just didn’t. He’ll have to attend to that this very day. I’m not going to put in another night like that one, I can tell you. Is that boy not getting up?”

“Why, mother, he is up,” Marcia said cheerfully. “He went out a while ago. He suffered from a headache most of the night and thought a walk before breakfast would do him good. I wonder if we ate something for supper last night—I don’t feel so well myself this morning.”

She had gone to the kitchen table where the bread box stood, and had taken out the brown, bulging loaf of bread. Dorcas had made the bread. Things had gone on just the same in the Gunther household after Marcia’s coming here. Marcia herself could make bread, light, flavorous bread such as she had made for her father and Ole Jensen, the section-hand who stayed with them in Bethune. But Dorcas had gone on making her own bread for her son.

Dorcas turned on her in surprise. “Why, mercy me, we had nothing but cold-slaw and fried potatoes and cold ham,” she said, sharply indignant. Marcia saw the old woman’s eyes narrow behind her silver-rimmed spectacles. “You don’t look very chipper this morning, that’s sure. I hope you’re not coming down with something now.”

“I’ll be all right, mother, don’t worry.” Marcia was doing her best to make her voice sound as it should. If she could only telephone to the lumber-yard, or to Paul Brule’s, without Dorcas hearing!

She had cut the bread and arranged it on a plate, ready for toasting. “I’ll make the toast as soon as you’re ready for it, mother,” she said, her voice trembling in spite of herself.

Dorcas moved about the kitchen like a small, self-sufficient bird. She was horribly like a bird, with that elusive bird-soul of another incarnation, Marcia had always thought. She was small and erect, her eyes dark, piercing and yet unfocussed, with the sharp, meaningless attention of a bird’s. Those eyes had the almost imperceptible, nervous wink of a pullet’s eyes, and at each tiny flash of the dry lids Dorcas Gunther’s head seemed to wobble slightly and readjust itself with resolute, feeble dignity back upon her shoulders.

“I’ll make the toast,” Dorcas replied with vigor. “The best you can do is go out and get some fresh air yourself. You look green!”

Again the small eyes narrowed resentfully and it struck Marcia with sudden intuition that Dorcas, deep in her mind, was turning over some secret, jealous thought.

“I’ll set the table first, at least,” Marcia ventured.

“There’s nothing to do but turn up the plates,” Dorcas informed her crisply.

Turn up the plates! This habit of Dorcas’s, of setting the table the night before, with the plates laid upside down!

Marcia’s mind hurdled over her usual resentment at Dorcas’s religiously fixed routine, and at the implication that she herself was an intruder in that routine. She had felt from the first that this household had expanded at the cost of no inconsiderable effort to include her, Rolf’s wife. Her mind, however, did not rest upon that this morning. Nor did she give thought, as she had done each morning of this trying spring, to the fact that breakfast at seven meant a half hour for Rolf to walk in the garden with Dorcas, examining new, dutifully risen growth, commenting upon this and that, while Marcia cleared the table within the house and washed the dishes. She spent no rebellious moments reflecting upon the fact that although they rose at six, there had been scarcely an hour during the day that Rolf could devote to her. It had only been her unusually despondent mood that had moved him, the evening before, to go with her for that walk of theirs among the poplars.

“I think I will go out, then,” Marcia said, with an effort at being casual. “I’ll walk down toward the lumber-yard and probably meet Rolf.”

“Well, if it was me,” Dorcas observed, “I’d get as much fresh air picking the weeds out of that lettuce patch in the garden. I never saw the like, the way they keep coming up for this time of year.”

But Marcia was out of the door. Another instant within the sound of Dorcas Gunther’s voice and her nerves would have given way under the strain. But where could she go, now that she was out of the house? Her brain was in chaos, revolving around and around a small blank area at the very center of thought.

The fragile pink of the morning sifted down through the new leaves of the trees; the morning floated, tender and unbearably precious. It had the frangible delicacy of glass too thin. It was the infinitely fine spinning of a spider’s web, menaced with the silver weight of dew.

Marcia slipped swiftly about to the rear of the house. There, in the little garage behind the lilacs and the forsythias, stood Rolf’s automobile, which had carried him about on his business trips to the neighboring towns and farms. In cans on a shelf stood the remains of the sober dark blue enamel with which he had recently restored its freshness. Beneath the shelf hung a row of tools graduating tidily according to size. At the rear of the garage stood a work-bench, a long table and a pile of lumber. In this nook Rolf had spent many rainy afternoons fashioning shelves, plant stands and racks for his mother. His hands were full of a smooth skill; he could make an ingratiating wooden doll for a neighbor’s child, or an intricate frame for one of his mother’s samplers. From the briary stalks of an ancient rose tree that had died and had been dug out of the garden, he had fashioned a handkerchief box for Marcia, deftly intertwining the slender branches; the box gave off still a delicately sad and earthy odor.

Her hope that Rolf might have, unbelievably, gone to Bethune died sorely. She looked back at the house, inscrutable fear running wild within her. She would not tell Dorcas yet.

Not until she was out in the street, empty of any morning sight or sound except the flash and turn of wings and sun-pierced leaves, and the voices of birds like tinkling chains through the air, could she decide upon where she should go. There was little choice for her. She would go either to the lumber-yard, down on the flats by the river—or to Paul Brule’s place. She hesitated at the thought of going to the yard. Essinger, Rolf’s foreman, would be putting in his appearance there in a few minutes and if Rolf was not to be found her coming to seek him would be inexplicable. She determined to see Doctor Paul. She quickened her pace almost to a run as she hurried down the street.

Through a haze of insensibility to her surroundings, the beauty of the morning cried out to her. Immaculately the modest dwellings of Amaranth rose out of their snug gardens, clean and polished as toys for delicate children. The town seemed to have shrunk to a miniature, to have crept under crystal. She felt that she herself had grown out of all proportion and was stalking grotesquely through the amenities of the morning, visible from every tiny, glittering window-pane.

A farmer’s wagon was clattering down the avenue toward Lundy Street. From the hillside, near the college, a dog barked. Westward, away from the avenue, a small boy was running with a shining milk pail in his hand, the swing, flash, swing of the pail coming like a signal through the warm light.

Fearfully she slipped through the gateway before Doctor Paul’s trim bungalow. She would not ring the bell—there would seem to be something peremptory about that. She would simply knock.

She lifted her hand to the door. The sound of her knocking assailed her distraught senses like some thunderous beating upon the portals of a sepulcher. Then she waited through an eternity of silence.