Читать книгу The House in Dormer Forest - Mary Webb - Страница 7

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Jasper stood in the dining-room doorway and thought that the room looked like a cave—a dark cave from which anything might emerge, devils or angels. As he thought this he was gazing at Catherine. As a little boy, he had adored the tall white resurrection angel on its golden background in Amber’s Sunday book. He had been unusually fond of church and of Bible pictures, and, while Peter was busy in the kitchen, salting the raisins with which Sarah enlivened her Sabbath, he would be wrapt in contemplation of the resurrection angel. Now, having discarded angels, he needed something to put in their place. His mind had not yet cast away the old religious phraseology. Perhaps the hardest thing from which to break free in being born to the life of individual honesty is this protecting caul of ancient phrases and observances. To Jasper’s temperament these were peculiarly dear. At his first communion, when the Rector had read the plaintive ‘In the same night that He was betrayed ...’ Jasper had sobbed, and Mrs. Velindre, who was there in an armour of solemnity that frightened him, had eyed him suspiciously, thinking that he had a secret sin.

The dark sweetness of eucharistic dawns, the spiritual vitality of Christianity’s best ideals—these he had resigned. But there, in the restricted lamp-light, with demure, down-bent head and bright hair, bound in the manner of religious art, was Catherine Velindre, tangible and beautiful. Her white hands, just plump enough to be graceful, moved to and fro quietly. Her shoulders, which sloped a good deal beneath her dark silk blouse, gave her an air of fragility and gentleness. It seemed to Jasper that her face broke upon him like a radiant landscape seen from a forest, or a flower thrown from a dark window. He had always been rather sentimental about Catherine. That Peter also was, though only by fits and starts, encouraged him. So also did the fact that his elders thought it ‘very suitable’ that she should marry Peter; for Catherine possessed a small independent income which would help the Dormer property, to which it was arranged that Peter should succeed, Jasper having chosen the church. Her money was a barrier in Jasper’s eyes. He wished she were a beggar and he the lord of the manor. He thought her face would be adorable in a ragged setting, like the crescent moon on a wild night. He had always been eager to be her lover, but to-night he began to care for her in an intenser way. He put her in the empty niche in his spiritual life and took her for his guardian angel, who was to lead him along hard paths by the fascination of sheer whiteness. She would smile down at him in his tourney for Truth; she would be proud of him when he gave up material welfare for conscience’ sake.

He had an idea that they would all be proud of him, though possibly deprecating his views. During the uproar at the training college, which followed his outburst, during the sleepless nights when he mourned his cherished future (he had wanted to be a scholarly, cultured, yet practical vicar of some huge, wicked parish which he was to convert) in the midst of exasperating misconstruction of his motives; in all these he had comforted himself with the thought that Catherine, and in a lesser degree the rest of the home people, would know that his motives had been of the highest. He had thought that they would all agree that honesty was the one course open to him. So little do we know the personalities with which we are most intimate!

Jasper looked very handsome, very vital, very young, and therefore very pathetic, standing in the dusk beyond the furthest lamp-ray. His eyes dwelt eagerly and dreamily on Catherine, until he suddenly remembered that he had not, in Dormer phraseology, ‘been the rounds.’ The curious coldness of his reception was rather lost upon him, he was so dazzled by the halo he had just created for Catherine, the beauty of which he ascribed entirely to her, and not at all to his own imagination.

Mrs. Darke silently suffered his embrace; but so she always did. Ruby gave him one of her indifferent, wet kisses. Peter said ‘Hullo!’ which was, for him, demonstrative. Then, just as he reached Catherine, his father looked up and said the sentence he had hammered out as being suitable.

‘I’d have been better pleased to see you for a better reason.’

Grandmother raised her head, and Amber, tearful in the hall, thought that she looked, with her small, bright eyes, like a snake about to strike.

‘Why hast thou brought down my grey hairs?’ queried grandmother, rather inappositely, for her ringlets were as black as sloes. This was by courtesy of a certain mixture called ‘Uzit,’ or through lack of the emotions, for the emotions turn more heads grey than does old age. It is not the Isouds and the Teresas of the world that conserve their youth, but the Aphrodites.

‘I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of,’ said Jasper. Mrs. Darke looked up.

‘You have sinned against the Holy Ghost!’

‘Ghost—ghost!’ muttered Mrs. Velindre.

‘There’s no such person,’ said Jasper, defiant because he was alarmed at his own daring.

‘Blasphemer!’ Mrs. Darke eyed her son with what an onlooker, who did not know their relationship, would have called venom.

Jasper stuck out his chin; it was long, like his mother’s.

‘Blasphemer against what? Sinner against what?’ he asked with exasperation. ‘You can’t blaspheme against a lie.’

Solomon flung The Golden Chance across the room and banged his fist on the table.

‘Silence, sir!’ he shouted.

‘Father,’ said Jasper, his voice shaking with passion and disappointment, ‘I won’t be silent. It’s lying to say I believe the idiotic hotch-potch of the churches.’

‘Silence!’ roared Solomon again.

‘Oh, why does Jasper rub them up the wrong way?’ whispered Amber.

‘I won’t be treated like a naughty boy!’ said Jasper furiously.

‘A naughty boy! Yes! A very naughty boy!’ said grandmother. ‘When I was young, caning was the cure.’

Grandmother had been brought up on ‘Cautionary Tales for the Young.’

‘Yes, a good stout stick’ll find God for most of ’em,’ remarked Solomon, adding with an air of great reasonableness, ‘God’s God.’

‘Oh, can’t you understand? Won’t you understand?’ Jasper’s voice was pleading.

‘We understand,’ said Mrs. Darke, ‘that you must have done something wicked and don’t want to believe.

Jasper’s lips quivered. So they thought all his spiritual conflicts mere fleshly lusts! This misconception irritated him as much as it hurt him.

‘You’re not angry with me because I don’t believe in God,’ he said, ‘but because I’m different from you.’

He had hit upon the truth. What they hated him for—and Mrs. Darke’s feeling, like Mrs. Velindre’s, did reach a silent vindictiveness—was that he had disparted himself from the gelatinous mass of the social ego, as the one live moth from a heap of dead larvæ. Their quarrel with him was wholly material, though it was disguised as a spiritual warfare. (Grandmother often referred to herself as one of a militant band warring against ‘Midian,’ an impersonal and mysterious foe as to whose identity no one ever evinced the slightest curiosity.) It was the inchoate obstructing formative power; the inert pressing down upon life. They were not aware of it, but Jasper saw it, and it made him miserable. If he could have felt that his father and mother and grandmother and all the hostile faces he glimpsed beyond them were really fighting for an ideal, however dim and rudimentary, he would have been able to respect them, and even like them, though they tore him to pieces. There would also have been the chance that they were right, that they might convince him. He would have liked to be convinced of some of the things they professed to believe. Failing that, a definite adversary, a hope of either victory or defeat, would have been welcome. What more could a young man ask? Jasper asked it, but he did not get it. An amorphous mass is not definite; it gives no hope of anything but blind, aimless struggling. He was horrified at his sudden vision of the vast crowd-egoism which says: ‘You are not as we, so we crush you.’ He felt this in grandmother’s eyes when she gazed owlishly upon him out of her twilight. Still more he felt it reaching out to him from his mother’s mind. She had no need to speak or look. It was enough that she was in the room; the silent air grew sinister with an unspoken threat.

‘Different?’ said Solomon slowly. ‘Ay, you are, more’s the pity.’

‘Well, father, that’s how the world gets on. You go a step higher than your father. I go a step higher than you.’

‘Conceited ass!’ Peter spoke roughly. He was annoyed that Jasper could talk above his head.

Jasper turned on him furiously, and their eyes met across Catherine’s bent head with mutual antipathy. Jasper despised Peter as a reactionary and a lover of the fleshpots of orthodoxy. Peter disliked Jasper because he had more imagination than himself. Each, feeling the atmosphere of the house lowering over him, mistrusted the other. Left to themselves, they would probably have been interested in each other’s differences. At least, they would have been tolerant. But an inimical atmosphere creates quarrels.

Catherine raised her eyes to Jasper’s.

‘Who put those dreadful ideas into your head, Jasper?’ she asked. ‘You can’t have thought of them yourself.’

‘Why not?’

He looked at her pleadingly with his brilliant hazel eyes. As she watched him, Peter slowly lost his lustre for her. Yes. Jasper was distinguished. There was something in his face that had not been there a few months ago, that was not in any of the other faces round the table. She could not exactly name it, not understanding that it was the essence of Jasper’s being unveiling itself to her. What she did see very clearly was that he would have been a great success in the Church. ‘Not a miserable little backstairs curate,’ she reflected, ‘nor a fat fool like Ernest Swyndle. He would have been asked everywhere. He would have ended with a bishopric. Idiot! Theatrical idiot! He shall end with a bishopric. He shall give up this nonsense, or else—’ the tip of her tongue just moistened the corners of her pointed mouth—‘or else he shall be punished. He shall suffer.’

‘You are too nice for such silly ideas,’ she said. ‘Tell me who talked to you about them?’

‘I thought things out for myself,’ said Jasper patiently. To anyone else he would have been haughty. ‘But I have got a friend whose views are in most ways the same.’

‘Is he expelled, too?’

Jasper shrank into himself at her tone. Then he reflected that Catherine could never be intentionally unkind, and pulled himself together.

‘It’s no disgrace to be expelled for an idea. He would have been glad to be expelled with me, only he was a lecturer, not a student. He left of his own accord because he disagreed with the Head.’

‘What about?’

‘Everything. He hates all the things the Head likes, only he keeps his temper better than I do. He’s older.’

‘Age always tells!’ cried grandmother. ‘Quality and age go together.’

‘A fine chap!’ Jasper flushed with enthusiasm. ‘He’s all for the anarchic state.’

‘Anarchists!’ Solomon was irate almost to apoplexy. ‘Look you, my lad, no more of that. Your thoughts are your own; if you want to be damned, you will be damned—’

‘Be damned,’ said grandmother, but without expletive intention.

‘—But I can and will stop you fouling the house with such talk. Board and lodging you can have, but no more argufying. Behave and stay, or argufy and go. See?’

Jasper saw only too well that life at Dormer was going to be unbearable. He was in the white-hot missionary and martyr stage. His message might be one of negation, but it was none the less precious to him.

‘I won’t be muzzled!’ he cried violently.

‘Mad dogs always are,’ remarked Peter.

Jasper glared at him.

‘I’ll go!’ he said. ‘I’ll go clean away and never see any of you again.’ He choked. The first crepuscular oncoming of the fog of misunderstanding and misconstruction is very hard to bear. When the blackness has engulfed and numbed the soul, rebellion dies and the soul sinks into painless despair.

Catherine laid down her comb and tooth-brush, straightened herself, and looked at Jasper. It would not suit her at all for him to go away. How could she, if he went away, save his soul? She rested her chin on her hands and let her eyes absorb him. He was, for the moment, saturated with, engulfed in her will. He was fascinated and rather alarmed. She had never looked at him like that before. No one seemed to observe them, all being intent on their own interests. Mrs. Darke was tearing a piece of linen in a way that was reminiscent of a cat tearing feathers out of a bird. Catherine’s eyes remained steady, and Jasper, as if drawn by a cord, slowly leaned toward her till, with elbows resting on the table, he almost touched her.

‘Cathy!’ he whispered. ‘Cathy?’

His lips moved and remained parted. The first feverish glow of passion swept over his face, leaving it troubled.

‘Stay—with me!’ she whispered.

‘I can’t, I can’t!’

‘I want you.’

‘They’ll drive me mad if I stay.’

Once more, Catherine submerged him under her gaze. The room was quite silent at the moment.

‘Jehovah!’ said grandmother suddenly. She believed in ejaculatory prayer, and her style was coloured by her literature.

‘Tch!’ said Catherine irritably. But Jasper had heard nothing.

‘I want you to stay more than anything in the world, Jasper. Will you?’

‘I’ll stay if I die for it,’ whispered Jasper.

He knew that there was nothing more solid, iron and soul-destroying than an inimical atmosphere. It kills more quickly than fire or sword. It is more ferocious than a wild beast. To live among people who have a false and unfriendly estimate of one’s character, who misconstrue motives, against whose changeless prejudice the wretched spirit flings itself in vain—this is a refinement of torture with which few sympathize. Then Catherine smiled up at him and the room seemed to grow peaceful again. The sudden outbreak, thunderous and threatening, had sunk to calm. He knew it would come round afresh in the manner of tempest; for the people of Dormer could see only one point of view—their own. This is the hotbed from which strife, national and individual, always springs—narrow mentality, shrivelled emotions, over-weighted with physical strength, brooded upon by a still narrower mentality, that of the past. This, because it is effete, is considered immortal, and has been glorified by man into a god of vengeance.

Jasper, on his side, had the roughness of the conscious outlaw, the élan of the growing plant, the necessitated fierceness of a creature outnumbered. He could see their point of view, but he was afraid to put off his armour of combativeness, and if he had done so there was no common ground where they could have met, for the family never would see his. His virtues were crimes in their eyes, his hopes a madman’s raving.

‘Ring for prayers!’ said Mrs. Darke suddenly.

Peter plunged at the bell. Ruby yawned. Solomon woke up, and in the kitchen ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ came to an abrupt end.