Читать книгу The White Reef - Martha Ostenso - Страница 4

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The Princess was due from Victoria, north-bound, at ten o’clock. At half-past nine, the amber glow that filled the Darnells’ sitting room from the west windows had begun to vibrate curiously with a blue that was all but palpable. Young Jorgen, who had just come into the house, sat down between two hummocks of the old plush sofa and with elaborate carelessness lighted a cigarette. He was eighteen and looked upon a cigarette as antidote to all the ills the mind of man is heir to. But even a cigarette, he observed profoundly to himself, could not dispel the unease this room created within him just now.

He glanced about him with discomfort. His brother Paul, the eldest of the family, sat beside a window with his chair tilted back against the wall, a newspaper spread open to the faded light. The paper, Jorgen reflected with scorn, was two days old—it had come up on the last mail boat—and Paul must have read every item in it at least twice. His face, moreover, did not carry the expression of one who was reading. It was bitter as—well, as wormwood, Jorgen thought, rather proud of the simile. And on the day when they had found the note Nona had left for them, Paul’s face had been black as the north cliff in a storm, except for the white, deep lines down either side of his nose. Why the dickens did he have to demean himself—yes, that was the word—like that, anyhow? It only made Pa feel so much worse.

Right now Pa was sitting in his old Morris chair, as far away as possible from the yellow oak organ in the corner. He hadn’t gone near the organ, he hadn’t even whistled a tune, since Nona went away. He sat now in his carpet slippers, smoking his pipe and looking at the floor, nodding once in a while to a story of Australia old Timothy Entwhistle was telling him. Nodding, but only half listening, Jorgen knew. Well, it was unfair of Nona to do this to Pa—with Ma dead only three years! Jorgen experienced a twist of anger somewhere in the region of his heart. There were new crannies around Pa’s eyes, too; and his hair, which Nona had always kept brushed back in a thin gray pompadour, swept limply forward now over his high forehead.

Eva, Paul’s wife, sat beside the center-table, knitting a tiny pink-and-white jacket. She sat there so that she wouldn’t look quite so big, Jorgen observed with disgust. In his opinion, women in that state should be kept in a vault, and not because anyone would want to run off with them, either! If he ever married, and it was quite unlikely ... He sighed with disquietude as he recalled suddenly how pretty Lydie Thorpe had grown of late.

The shadows of the simple furniture in the room lengthened along the scrubbed pine floor, so that everything seemed to increase grotesquely in size. Was the low, calcimined ceiling stooping lower, or had the china closet in the corner opposite the organ stretched an inch or two? His mother had always called him an imaginative child. He sighed again, this time out of wistfulness for himself.

“Stop that, Jorgen,” Eva said in a tone that was sharp but low, for her. She glanced uneasily aside at Silas, who sat out of earshot, near the dining room door.

The boy flushed with resentment at her stupid assumption that she could read his thoughts.

“I wasn’t—” he began impatiently, but Eva, raising her eyebrows with a cheerful wifely smile toward Paul, interrupted him.

“Shall I light the lamp, Pauly?” she asked casually, in the way she did every night, as though nothing were amiss. “It’s getting bad for your eyes, there.”

“Pauly,” Jorgen thought with loathing. Eva was too much for a sensitive man on the threshold of life. Her voice reminded him of a bright wire in a wind.

Paul drew his watch from his pocket, the watch with the gold hunting case. The opening of it made the sound of a click beetle. He gazed at it critically.

“No,” he remarked. “I’ll have to be going down for the mail in fifteen minutes. I heard the Princess blow a minute back.”

Eva gave a trembling sniff, bent her head and wiped the corner of her eye with her knitting. “Well—” she whimpered, “you might have thought of me wanting some light. All you can think of—”

“Oh, Lord!” Paul exclaimed, stood for a moment helplessly irresolute, then struck a match on his shoe sole and pulled down the lamp on its chain above the center-table.

Something that had been at the back of Jorgen’s mind all evening suddenly stepped off his tongue. And immediately, because of the attention it drew from his father and from the vast, white-haired old Timothy, he regretted the utterance.

“I ran into Ethan Ashe a while ago,” he blurted out. “He says he saw the Spaniards dancing around the wreck of the Santa Ines last night.”

Paul, turning up the wick of the lamp, scowled down at his young brother. “It’s time you were beginning to grow up,” he said, “and stop listening to that old crack-pot.”

But Jorgen had seen the strange glint in Paul’s eyes, just as the yellow flame rose in the lamp. And Eva sat forward over her knitting, her small mouth half open, her gaze fixed eagerly upon Jorgen. Her pale eyes were almost pretty now, with the pupils so large.

Silas stood up and said, “I’ll get some more tobacco, Timothy.” He went to the kitchen and closed the door behind him. Something about the quiet closing of that door made Jorgen’s scalp spring forward—as it had done once when he had seen a ball of Saint Elmo’s fire at the top of a mast in a storm.

While Silas was gone from the room, there was a tap at the front door. Eva called on a high note, “Come in!”

It was Ivar Hansen. With his hat in his hand, he loomed massive-shouldered and blond in the lamplight. He smiled about at everybody, questioningly, a little uncertainly.

Eva gave a shrill little laugh. “Oh, you startled me, Ivar! Jorgie has just been talking about the Spanish ghosts,” she explained. “I guess it got me sort of nervous before I thought of it.”

“Old Ethan has been walking again,” Ivar said as he seated himself with a smile.

Silas returned, nodded to Ivar, and offered his pouch to Timothy.

“Well,” boomed old Timothy, “I suppose Ethan has as much right to walk around as the rest of us. He isn’t doing anyone any harm. His prophecies of doom don’t disturb us—unless a few of the women and children.”

But Jorgen observed that the old man drew stoutly upon his meerschaum pipe. And the poet in Jorgen rebelled. Of course, there was no such thing as a ghost, but there was such a thing as the genius of a place. And who was to prove that its power was not a supernatural one? These people, his own family, old Timothy, and even Ivar Hansen, sea-locked in the Cove with its undecipherable past, smiled, jeered, pooh-poohed, put on the manly face of scorn—but the white and mystical bondage of the Reef looked out of their eyes.

“Well, I know some men who don’t like to talk about it,” Eva breathed. “And sometimes I think there might be something in it, no matter what you say. You know what they’re saying about—” she hesitated and bit her lip—“about Sheel.”

“What are they saying about him?” old Timothy asked.

“I remember plain as anything Prissy Totten saying she saw the Spaniards the night before he came here and started widening the channel and building the pier and all. She said it meant evil and now—”

“Prissy Totten!” Paul sniffed impatiently. “She’s as cracked as Ethan Ashe!”

Not a word of Nona, even indirectly, thought Jorgen, and winced for the cowardice of his people. Then for his own lack of spirit. Why had he not the courage to speak out, to say that Paul was pacing the floor now because in a few minutes the post office would be open and perhaps there would be a letter from Nona, assuring them all that she was, at least, decently married by now?

Old Timothy rose at last, bowed his white head in a courtly good night, took his hat and departed.

A moment later, Paul glanced again at his watch. While he still held it in his hand, a quick, light step sounded on the wooden floor of the front porch. Jorgen started up, but sat promptly down again. It seemed as though his knees had turned to water. Paul, too, seated himself abruptly and stared at the open door to the little hallway.

Nona was standing there, setting her small, ginger-colored suitcase on the floor, throwing her red béret across to the sofa beside Jorgen and tossing back her dark mane of hair with a rippling spill of laughter.

“What is this—a wake?” she cried, her eyes flashing with mockery from one to the other in the room, her hands propped wench-fashion on her hips. But she waited for no answer. She sped across the room and kneeling flung her arms about Silas, kissed his cheek resoundingly, and with her brown, long hand mopped back the hair off his temples. “Only five days, darling,” she laughed, “and you’ve let your hair go helter-skelter!”

“Nona—Nona!” Silas exclaimed with a visible effort to control his emotions. Jorgen, standing now, saw that his father had gone quite pale and that he blinked as though he could not see clearly as his hands clutched Nona’s shoulders. “Was it only a lark, then, my girl?”

“A lark!” Paul’s voice cut through the taut air. “You have a nice way of putting it, Pa!”

Nona sprang to her feet and faced her elder brother. “What have you to do with this?” she asked equably. “It was a lark!” When Paul did not reply at once, she turned to Jorgen. “Give me a cigarette, Jorgie!”

With nervous haste Jorgen lighted one and gave it to her. He had never seen his sister look so magnificent—so—so awful. Was Paul such a complete, insensate dullard that he could not get the furious rhythm of her? She looked like the sound of that symphony they had heard on the radio two Sundays back.

“A cigarette,” Eva bleated, wringing her hands, “—at a time like this!”

“Shut up!” Paul barked. Then, hastily remembering, he laid a hand gently on her shoulder and murmured, “You mustn’t excite yourself, dear.” He looked frozenly across the room at his sister. “You’ll have to give a better account of yourself than that, if you still want to consider yourself a member of this family. Everybody in the Cove knows—”

“I don’t give a tar-coated damn for the Cove!” Nona said distinctly, leaning on her palms across the center-table to look at Paul. “I ran off with Quentin Wingate and had a grand time with him on the yacht. When I met his relatives, I didn’t like ’em, so I came home. And that’s all the account I’m giving of myself to you or anyone else, unless I happen to feel like it.”

Paul’s eyes, Jorgen saw irefully, were fish-cold. “You left him when you found out his old man had lost his money, eh?”

For the first time, Nona’s face darkened with color. She stood erect, her shoulders very square beneath the blue flannel of her short jacket. Her slender feet, beneath the strong, slim ankles, stood firmly apart in their flat-heeled shoes and her arms were crossed before her rising bosom. Admiringly, Jorgen remembered the many times he had seen her in just this attitude, on the deck of a seine boat in a tearing gale.

“She wouldn’t be smart enough for that,” Eva thrust in, and then shrank from Nona’s scorching eyes.

Nona swung suddenly around upon Ivar Hansen. “Well, have you nothing to say?” she demanded. “You might as well get your oar in with the rest.”

“I was just leaving, Nona,” he began haltingly. “I—”

But Silas had risen and had his arm about Nona’s shoulder. “You’re home, my girl,” he said, searching for the right words, “and that’s all I wanted. We can think what we like about your running off like that—but you’re back, and you can take your own time to tell about it. This is your home, Nona, and—”

Nona saw that he was having difficulty. She patted his denim shirt sleeve, her mouth twisting into a smile.

“I’ll talk to you, Pa,” she said, “but not with them around.” She kissed his lean brown jowl and turned to Ivar. “Did you say you were just going home, Ivar? If you are, I’ll walk out with you.”

She started for the door and Ivar followed her with a nodded good night to the others. Jorgen regretted deeply that he was still too young to be noticed by people who had things happen to them. But his time would come! One day he would be editor of a weekly paper here in the Cove—the first editor of the first paper within sound of the White Reef. And what he would make of that! And that was nothing compared to what he would one day become. Then, disconcertingly, he fell to musing about Lydie Thorpe. Her chin was cute, with that dimple. But people said you shouldn’t trust chin dimples....