Читать книгу The Young May Moon - Martha Ostenso - Страница 6

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In thin melancholy, its notes separate and pure as the beads of a rosary, as the words of an old song, as the tears of a familiar sorrow, came the angelus from the southern dwindling of the little town. As the last note failed and merged into the twilight sky of September that pierced the heart with its intimations, three chimes sounded from the northward, from the belfry of the Lutheran Church there. Three high and fragile echoes they were, faltering into the notes of the first bell like a frail hand laid within a dying.

Years ago, scrupulous Lutherans of Amaranth had protested against the introduction of this custom, scenting popery. But the two old men of God, fast friends for years, never known to have discussed their doctrinal differences together, had continued to ring out every evening upon the town their tranquil benediction, and the reassurance of each to the other that life was good. Old folk of Amaranth, in the stillness of their years, heard the bells and ceased their nodding, and with wryly tilted heads counted the strokes, muttering secretly about the slow march of the hours. A poet or two, in the College on the hill, had heard the bells weep in November dusks olive-colored with rain and dead, blown leaves. Young theologians, walking alone, had heard them doubt and wonder—and doubt again. Children, pausing in their greedy last hour of play, had waited for that sweet lull that follows a bell’s ringing, when the air holds lightly a thousand small voices singing on and on to the far edges of the world. And tramps had cowered away from the sound of those bells, withdrawing into the shelter of the neatly squared piles in the lumber-yard down beside the railway track.

Marcia Gunther knew all these things about the bells. It was merely part of that knowledge of hers about things which she never shared with anyone in Amaranth. She shared her life with no one now—except, of course, with Rolf, who was closer to her in these days than her own life. She could talk to Rolf now, any time when she was alone and away from Dorcas. Once, when the catalpa tree was in white bloom in the garden, Dorcas had come out and found her there, resting against the tree, her lips moving in a whisper. Dorcas had spoken sharply to her then, her face tightly sealed, like a parchment that might bear fearful runes: “I declare! The way you carry on! Out here all alone—talking to yourself. It’s enough to give anyone the creeps, the way you go on. It’s no wonder people ask queer questions about you. They’ll all be thinking you’re out of your head, if you don’t change. Come—inside, now—and rest on the veranda.”

Dorcas had spoken reproachfully, but at such times no one could really reproach her. No one could come close enough to bring a reproach. Between her and the world she had known, shielding her now as he had never done in those other days, stood Rolf Gunther. She had gone in from the garden with Dorcas and had sat for a long time in the porch swing, but she had smiled to herself with her own gentle knowledge. After all, Dorcas owed her something now. Had she not cared for the old woman night and day for weeks after Rolf had been drowned.... Yes—drowned! That’s what they all said.

The town was wide and murmurous as a flood of mist about her, at this hour. Gorgeous trees, darkening within, rode like islands through the flood. She thought of how, coming from the flat prairie-candor of Bethune—was it only a year since?—she had first looked upon Amaranth as a sort of interlude in the earth’s life. Perhaps, she had fancied, when the earth here at a momentous crisis in its experience had stretched out like a smooth tide into the west, this little valley had curled itself inward, reticent as a shell. The coming of the town had been no violation of its reserve. It may even have been that the town was looking for just such a sanctuary where its shy consciousness would not be disquieted by the alarums of progress. Here was no echo of the stridor of those cities whose very names clanged with the structure of steel and stone beating down the structure of the earth. The shell of the valley heard only its own murmur, its own ancient music, of which it never tired, nor bade for change.

Marcia had found that one could walk in the white and isolating dream of falling snow, or under the hot blue blaze of the August sky, or in the wind or rain of any season, and be made intensely aware of the pause of life here. One listened spellbound to the instant of hesitation in the earth’s pulse, to the sudden lapse in the wind; one waited, listening, for a footfall over some airy threshold, a footfall that never came. She had come to know, with the arrival of her first summer in Amaranth, that for her the town might have been but a whimsical afterthought of Death upon Life.

Her mind strove to veer away from its course, to cling to the tender, irrational mood that had been enfolding her. Perhaps its was madness, this ever-returning sense that Rolf was beside her, closer than he had ever been in life. Sometimes it frightened her, and then would follow the crucifying hours of knowledge that Rolf was dead, dead. She beat the thing back now, quickening her pace as though to escape, physically, from it. Before Dorcas she must always be unswervingly controlled.

A chill rash of perspiration broke out on her brow, and on the backs of her hands. But it was not from hurrying, she knew that, although it was no longer easy for her to hurry. She bore constantly on her heart the fear that, somehow, Dorcas Gunther would learn the truth about what had happened on that night in May, four months ago now, when Rolf had left her to face a world he could not face himself. The fear persecuted her. Before her eyes the old woman loomed up at times to a gigantic height, ready to beat down upon her with her thin, pointed knuckles, like steel studs. It had begun to make a coward of her, especially in the dark of her own room where her fancy was without the restraining effect of Dorcas’s presence. It was not unreasonable to believe that one could die of remorse. One died, really, over and over again.

It was best to fill your mind with sound, square things, like the four outlying corners of Amaranth and all that they enclosed. She would always have the sense of having become acquainted with the town as the blind become acquainted with the raised letters on a page. She could point out, eastward from the avenue, the dozen or more homes of the well-to-do, guarded austerely by the belfry of the Baptist Church. She knew that in those self-conscious and mildly pompous dwellings on the hillside to the north, the professors and their families lived, the college forming the center of the cluster. To the westward lay the flats by the river and the squalid shacks of the squatters, and southward the Catholic Church with its uplifted cross, wearing its ivy like a surplice.

But of the people she knew nothing. She saw them as they saw her—through the curiously colored prism of hearsay. Rolf had told her of Hector Aldous, the banker, and of old Absolom Peck, the mayor, who had bought six sections of land in the county when it was only five dollars an acre. The Reverend Thomas Neering, Dorcas Gunther’s minister, had money in his own right—or was it his wife’s? Hepzibah Cropp, Mr. Neering’s aunt, lived just across the way from the parsonage and was “queer.” Each week Herb Lundy, who owned the large store on the corner, would approach Mr. Neering discreetly, and articles which poor Hepzibah had innocently taken a fancy to would be returned to the Lundy counters and show cases.

Of course, there was Nora Hanrahan, who lived in a rambling cottage on almost an acre of quaint garden just south of the College. Marcia knew Nora Hanrahan. She had known her, it seemed, the instant they had met on that afternoon a few days after Marcia had come to Amaranth. They had met at Nora’s gateway, where Marcia had paused in her walking to pluck stealthily a drooping dahlia from a flowered border that led from the house to the street, on either side of the narrow, well-kept walk. She did not know that she was being watched until a voice spoke from the porch and she looked up to see a sturdy woman of nearly forty stepping down to meet her. “You’re the girl Rolf Gunther has brought up from Bethune for a present to his mother,” the woman had greeted her with a friendly chuckle. “Well, I’m Nora Hanrahan, the town gadabout. Come along in. I’d like to talk to you.” They had talked and laughed and drunk tea together for an hour before Marcia realized that the afternoon was gone. She had hurried away then, with an armful of asters to grace the table for Rolf’s supper. Dorcas had shrugged her shoulders at the sight of the brightly-colored blooms and had said nothing when Marcia spoke of Nora Hanrahan. But the next morning the flowers were gone from the table. The simple glass bowl that had held them was empty and had been put back in its place on the sideboard. It was then that Marcia had learned that it was better not to ask any questions of Dorcas Gunther.

Marcia had seen little of Nora Hanrahan since the spring. Such warmth of human companionship was not for her—she needed no one to remind her of that. And Nora had not forced her friendship upon her.

Marcia drew in her sharpened breath and knew that she must walk erect, inconspicuously. From behind the unlighted windows of the avenue eyes would be upon her, the eyes of the respectable people of Amaranth, who were undoubtedly wondering still, after almost a year, how poor Rolf Gunther had come to marry Marcia Vorse, out of Bethune, that iniquitous town. No sympathy for her would allay that wonder, to which now had been given the added zest of incredulity. The months had slipped away and expectations had not been realized. The vulgar surmise had been amiss.

She walked faster, squaring her shoulders, shifting her parcels from one arm to the other. The whole town would know by now, she reflected. Herb Lundy’s wife, that very afternoon in the store, had asked her point-blank and Marcia had replied simply, without evasion. Mrs. Lundy’s telephone served purposes more interesting than the receiving of orders for flour and sugar and pearl buttons.

The avenue began to lift gently now. To the right, at the next corner—those twenty-eight paces down the narrow wooden sidewalk—and there was the House again. Always, always, wherever she went, or whatever she did—this endless coming back again to the house. It had become a nightmare.

When she came to the corner she relaxed a little. She had passed beyond the prying eyes. She walked more slowly. An unreasoning fear of stumbling had seized her of late every time she set foot upon that ill-kept walk. She would have to pick her steps carefully.

There flashed into her mind again the dialogue that had taken place between herself and Mrs. Lundy. She had managed somehow, at the time, to keep from flaring with anger, scorn. Now the back of her neck burned.

“Your poor soul! You ought to try a little baking-soda, with hot water, first thing in the morning, honey,” the woman had whispered, hoarsely discreet, her eyes rolling about the store as though their sockets were oiled. An old farmer had eased himself against the opposite counter, leaning on an elbow, one red, scaly hand folded over the other, had eyed her slowly up and down, and shifted quid. The delivery boy had detained a crate of eggs in mid-air and surveyed her with gross physiological curiosity.

It was the resulting humiliation, perhaps, that had goaded her into buying this finer nainsook, five cents more the yard than Dorcas had said would be sufficient to pay for it. Five cents more the yard—fifty cents instead of forty-five. She quailed a little now as she thought of Dorcas’s face, at the slow, deliberate tightening of her expression when she should hear of the fifty cents.

A gentle faintness swept over her, almost imperceptible. She told herself that it was this new thing that was with her like an elusive yet powerful presence. Old Doctor Schemmel, to whom she had gone, had told her not to be alarmed at such symptoms. She knew this faintness, however, had come upon her at the thought of Dorcas. That growing feeling mingled of fear and hatred might kill her some day, she thought, might come upon her suddenly and strangle her.

Here was the hedge now. And the wrought-iron gate with its spear-head pickets. She opened it painstakingly and closed it behind her as though it were something easily broken. Dorcas had only to hear a latch click ever so gently to have ready a sharp reminder of Marcia’s unfortunate upbringing.

She faced the house and saw it again as she had seen it for the first time nearly a year ago. Cream brick it was, the screened veranda in front and the entire left side of the building matted with Virginia creeper. She stared at it. Now and again, as upon that first time, the vine seemed to crawl and crawl, tendril over tiny tendril, spreading from a deep central force like sea-foam on sand, and gaining way with its delicate, relentless grasp. The vine ran faintly pink in this light; the suggestion was sinister.

Dorcas sat within the sifted dusk of the veranda. She wore a white wool scarf, so long that her feet, on a green felt footstool, were wrapped in one end of it. Her stout cane leaned against her chair, ready to hand. She did not speak as Marcia entered. Her face was turned toward the screen beyond which the catalpa tree stood.

“I’m back, mother,” Marcia said wearily, drawing her breath in with difficulty. Her throat and breast felt sore, as though she had been running against the wind.

By way of coming to life, Dorcas drew a faint sigh. “I see,” she remarked shortly. She did not turn her head from its awkward position toward the screen.

“I’ve been away longer than I thought I’d be,” Marcia went on, seating herself for a moment on the edge of a porch chair and laying her parcels in her lap. “I just can’t hurry, though. It seems the least effort—”

Still Dorcas did not move her head. She cleared her throat faintly, fastidiously, as though dislodging from it some constricting malice. “Well,” she said, “I had my work to do when I was like you—and I did it. I did it without the help you have, too.”

Marcia lifted her eyes slowly and looked at Dorcas Gunther. She was hard, and cold, and gray, like the setting in of winter. Her eyebrows were short and black above her restless, restless eyes. Her mouth was a compressed, uneasy line. Her thin hands lay always still, now, folded tightly in her lap. She was bitter, she was obstinate, she was senselessly cruel, and yet she was pathetic, too, when one paused generously to think of how she had suffered, was suffering even now. Rolf had gone from Dorcas forever—but Rolf still lived for this girl he had brought into the house as his wife. That mystical possession gnawed relentlessly at Dorcas Gunther’s heart, Marcia knew. And on that day when Marcia had returned from Doctor Schemmell’s and had told her what was to be, the old woman’s feelings had flamed so suddenly, though she was still bedridden, that Marcia had hurried from the house to escape her violence.

“Do you think you ought to sit here any longer, mother?” Marcia asked as she prepared to get up again and take her parcels into the house. She strove to keep her voice gentle as she spoke. She must not let that tide of anger and impatience come over her again. It was especially bad for her just now. It always left her weak afterwards. She gathered up her parcels and got to her feet. “It has been warm, but there’s a little chill in the air now that the sun has gone.”

When she received no reply she went into the house and laid the small packages of groceries on the table in the kitchen. Then she passed into the dining room, switched on a wall-bracket there, and unwrapped the packages containing the gingham for the aprons, and the nainsook. She glanced once through the square arch with its green velour curtains. The front door was still open, as she had left it. Dorcas had not come in. She knew the old woman was sitting out there listening to the undoing of the parcels. She could feel it. She thought of the cat she and her father had had at home in Bethune, that could hear from the attic a parcel of meat being untied in the kitchen.

She spread the gingham out on the table. It had a good smell, substantial, friendly, reassuring. Four yards of plain blue, four of pink pin-check. She would trim each apron with pipings of the other. Blue on pink—pink on blue. Her father used to sew gingham dresses for her. Actually. It was incredible now, as many things were that had seemed only natural then. She picked up the nainsook and rolled it in with the gingham, laying the bundle on the hood of the sewing machine where it stood between the two rows of potted geraniums in the bay window.

The window was open an inch or two and through it a light breeze entered and made the marquisette curtain yawn gently. The air caressed her hands. It was cool and moist as newly turned soil. She became giddy from the life-smell of it. Her fingers clenched and opened, as though to seize the thing that was there, blowing in to her out of the soft gray dark. Reality, living, bitter-sweet, grave and beautiful reality of night in early autumn! Reality flowing into this house where only Death lurked! She closed her eyes and stood still, facing the window.

When she lifted her eyes presently and glanced sideways, scarcely turning her head, she saw Dorcas Gunther’s shadow on the wall. A small and pinched shadow it was, trailing a fainter shadow like a long web—the wool scarf. Marcia felt the cold prickling of her skin over her whole body.

She turned and faced the old woman. “I didn’t hear you come in,” she murmured.

“No,” Dorcas said, “you didn’t. I don’t know where your wits are. You didn’t know I came into the house this morning, either, when you were playing the piano.”

Marcia felt herself reddening. Her throat throbbed. It all was so ludicrous, so insane. What in the world had she done now?

“Why—yes, mother,” she said, “I heard you come in from the garden. I knew—”

“You knew!” Dorcas interrupted her sharply. “What you don’t seem to know is that hymns are written to be played and sung to the glory of God—not to be danced to.”

Marcia remembered now. She had found a hymn-book open on the piano, a hymn-book—standing there so sober and erect where the sun streamed in through the window. As she started to play, the melody had seized her, as if it had been no hymn at all. She had made something else of it. It was the first time she had touched her piano since Rolf had died.

She stood aghast at the sheer frenzy in Dorcas Gunther’s face. The woman was mad. She retreated a step before the bony, clenched fist, half-raised.

“The sun was streaming in through the window, mother,” she explained hurriedly. “I felt—”

“Yes—you felt! I know what you felt!”

Of course, Marcia thought triumphantly, Dorcas did not know. She could not know that Marcia had felt Rolf’s presence, close to her there, in the sun’s radiance, all about her like the rapturous morning itself. What if she should tell Dorcas that now! What if she should tell her the whole truth about herself and Rolf—and how her own agony of remorse was alone responsible for the fact that she had stayed on in this house! What if she should tell her that some precious hope of atonement had alone kept her soul alive during these weeks!

Dorcas stubbornly pursued her thin complaint. “You’ll have to forsake your old ways, Marcia Vorse! I’ll have none of it while I’m alive to stop it. And now that brother Jonas is coming to live with us, there’ll be no place here for such goings-on.” She turned away and went to the kitchen where she began her vigorous preparations for supper.

Her brother Jonas! Rolf had told her something of old Jonas Todd. Dorcas had never spoken of him before in her hearing. Why had she said nothing about her plan to have her brother come to live with them? Nothing annoyed Marcia more than the old woman’s habit of investing the most trivial things with an air of secrecy.

Without a word, Marcia began setting the table for supper. She must not let such petty things annoy her so. She laid the table with a white cloth, and in the center a bowl of purple asters which Dorcas had cut from her garden that afternoon. Marcia thought once again of the great purple blooms that Nora Hanrahan had given her nearly a year ago. She wondered vaguely about Nora.... She would use the blue plates tonight, the ones Rolf had bought for her on his last trip down to Chicago.... She often thought it would be nice to talk with Nora again. Marcia had passed there, almost a week ago now, and had paused to look in at the gate. The doors were closed and the shades were drawn in the windows. ... Two cups and two saucers on the left of Dorcas’s place—and the little square of glazed tile, with the blue monk’s head, for the teapot.... Sooner or later, of course, she would learn all about Nora’s absence as she learned everything, from hearsay. ... Perhaps she could help in the kitchen now....

She stood back and surveyed the table absently. She placed Dorcas’s chair—the one that had been Rolf’s—more squarely in its place.

“I forgot to ask you about the nainsook.”

Dorcas spoke suddenly from the kitchen. The voice startled Marcia, as it always did when she was not expecting it, in spite of the fact that it carried a note of pleasant interest—almost as if Dorcas might be thinking of buying nainsook herself.

“Yes, mother,” Marcia said quietly as she entered the kitchen, “Mrs. Lundy had it. I got ten yards.”

“What did you pay for it?”

There it was at last, Marcia thought. “Why—let me see.” She was taking the bread from the box, her back turned toward Dorcas. She smiled secretly, with ridiculous daring. “It must have been forty-five—no, fifty cents a yard. Yes—it was fifty, because the gingham was thirty cents a yard, and that left—”

Some perverse devil had taken control of her mood. She could have chuckled from sheer delight at what she knew was passing in Dorcas’s mind.

“You asked how much it was, didn’t you, before you bought it?”

Dorcas’s voice maintained that slender margin of generosity which barely gives another the benefit of a doubt. Marcia knew, however, that the old woman trembled on the very edge of amazement, of puny outrage.

“Oh, yes—of course I did.”

Dorcas was standing beside her now, removing the slippery skins from new beets she had boiled that afternoon. The smell was nauseating—like warm flesh. Marcia hurried into the dining room to place the bread on the table.

The old woman’s voice followed her, edged with impatience now. “Well, then, you must have known it was fifty cents.”

Marcia seized the back of the chair that had been Rolf’s. She closed her eyes. Her daring, perverse mood had suddenly deserted her. She felt abruptly weary, as though some insidious drug were draining away her consciousness. It was odd how this experience had attacked her of late. She did not reply to Dorcas. She preferred to let herself drift, unresisting. The old woman’s voice took up the plaint again—a querulous plaint, a plaint about fifty cents. But to Marcia’s senses the sound became more and more distant.

“... If I didn’t think of things, I’d like to know where we’d be ... I talk and talk, but I’m tired of talking ... it fairly tuckers me out to be always on the lookout ... getting nowhere for all my trouble....”

All at once Marcia was clearly alert, excitement shaking her limbs. Something had happened, something extraordinary, something miraculous. She pressed her hands—her arms—vehemently about her body.

She turned and saw Dorcas standing in the doorway. The old woman was peering at her curiously—comprehendingly, too. She had ceased speaking, abruptly. In that moment, perhaps, whatever forgotten tenderness still remained in Dorcas Gunther’s soul fluttered upward and deepened the expression in the small, sharp eyes that sought Marcia’s face enquiringly.

Marcia had no need to speak.

“It’s bad luck to feel life first at the full of the moon,” Dorcas said in a low voice. “There’s no cradle in the full moon.”

Then she was gone—like a wraith.

Marcia moved slowly, quieting her heart, away from the table, into the hallway, up the stairs. From the open window of her room—her room and Rolf’s—she could see the moon, now barely risen, ovate and blood red.