Читать книгу The House in Dormer Forest - Mary Webb - Страница 8

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During prayers Amber could think of nothing but Jasper’s footsteps pacing backwards and forwards in his bedroom, which was above the dining-room. Long after every one had gone to bed she stood by her window, trying to gather courage to go and comfort Jasper. As a consciously plain woman she was deprecatory in action; as a sensitive woman she was tender to the reserves of others. She knew Jasper would be awake, going up and down like a caged creature. It was pathetic that he should feel so deeply a thing that seemed to her a trifle. That he should be homesick for a God and not able to find a God—this was tragic, terrible. But to-night the main point had been simply that he was expelled. On that everyone had harped. About that Jasper was defiant and wretched. Because of that he was tramping his room. She would go to him and tell him how greatly she admired him and sympathized with him. But no! The reserve that chained them all at Dormer and that often binds members of large families (so that the legends of chains rattling and fetters clanking in their haunted houses seem to have an allegorical significance) held her now a prisoner. Yet she could not sleep. The strange clashing of antagonistic temperaments, more obvious to-day than ever before; intuitive fear for Jasper, since she saw that his nerves were inadequate to the life before him—these things troubled her. She knew, because she loved him, that Jasper was one of those who need the woolly wrappings of convention—small, ordered thoughts, bounded desires, mediocre faiths, safe, communal rights. These would have kept his too sensitive spirit and easily frayed nerves warm and intact. She knew also that Jasper’s tragedy lay in the fact that he could not have these safe things. His passionate love of truth sliced them away and left him shivering in the cold air of individual effort; committed him to wild adventures in quest of God, to insensate hopes and black despairs. Jaded by these Alpine wanderings, he was unfit to bear the strain of life at Dormer, and was, as he once said with bitterness, ‘any man’s fool.’

Amber looked out into the chill moonlight. On the silver lawn there lay, black and sharp as carved ebony, the shadow of the House of Dormer. Its two heavy, rounded gables of dark red brick topped with grey stone, the solid, massed chimneys and the weather-vane (a gilded trumpet supposed to be blown by the winds) were painted, large and far-spreading, on the grass. The house gave a sense of solidity even by its shadows. From outside came the muttering and crying of the weir and the Four Waters. Through this continual plaint broke, at times, the mutterings of the herds that peopled the low, misty meadows, their dim shapes moving portentously in the vague moonlight. Their inarticulate malaise with autumn or the night, with their unknown destiny or the quality of their herbage, burst forth at times into a smothered bellow, an incipient roar, broken and muffled as a tide on rocks. Sometimes one would startle the air with a high note that was almost a shriek; sometimes there would rise a deep, low chorus akin to the melody of milking-time. Never, for long together, was the round, hollow Dormer valley without some rumour of their calling, like the herds of humankind, out of their tentative darkness, for they knew not what. The mist, which lay lightly on the fields, thickened along the stream into an opaque curtain, standing about the domain of Dormer like the bands of an old enchantment. Mist always haunted Dormer. Sometimes the house stood knee-deep in it, like a cow in water; sometimes it was submerged far below, like a shell on the sea floor, the mist—white, weighty, stirless—brimming nearly to the tops of the surrounding hills. At these times, when the morning cocks crew sharp and sweet from the rickyard, the plaintive sadness of their thin music pricked Amber to tears. It was as if a city long dead, for infinite ages forgotten, were summoned from ancient oblivion by a resurrection trumpet so faint and inward-sounding that only the eager spirit heard, while the clay-bound sleepers never knew that the moon had slipped down behind the western hill and the grey world flushed for dawn.

Amber listened to the faint night-sounds that came and went beneath the singing of the water and the grumbling of the herds. There was the sea-murmur of the woods that climbed the hills and chanted in winter a song more mysterious, though of less volume, than that of summer. There was the lisp and rasp of dry leaves that came about the house on the doubtful night-wind. There was the sibilant whisper of large-leaved ivy that clothed the walls in heavy layers. And within the house, from their bedroom across the landing, Amber could hear the voices of her father and mother uplifted in their evening prayer. They always said their prayers aloud, perhaps for the sake of example, and their voices—lugubrious and penetrating—seemed to Amber to issue from their room like her father’s setters from their kennel, dour, passionless, acquisitive. She felt shocked at herself for having had the idea, but with each rise in their inflexion the resemblance grew more distinct. At last they were still, and silence fell upon the house. Amber waited, hesitated, sought for some pretext for going to Jasper.

The time crept on to midnight. She opened her door, and straightway it seemed that the house was alive with noise, muted, but none the less noise. The echoing whisper of the clocks seemed very loud and full of meaning. The ticking of the one in the hall was like the falling of heavy drops of water. Then the grandfather clock hiccupped, and in a few minutes a storm of sound came up and along the passages. All the striking clocks gave out the hour, and from the kitchen—far down, as if from a cavern—the hoarse cuckoo shouted. Afterwards, in the comparative silence, as if in satiric jest, began a new ticking—the ticking of the death-watches. The old walls, hollowed and tunnelled by rats and mice, were so full of these little beetles that nobody took any notice of them except Sarah, who put cotton-wool in her ears nightly. But this was more than half in plain physical fear of earwigs, which she thought would penetrate to her brain. She had even been heard to say (in daylight) that ‘death-watches were poor feckless things, traipsing and yammering like a blind beggar with a stick.’ As Amber listened to these eerie tickings she was reminded of the sound of grandmother’s watch at night, and of the curious ebony watch-stand on which it hung. She thought whimsically of all the death-watches ticking busily, each on a miniature stand, carved with an hour-glass and a skull.

As if at the signal of midnight, there now began a new sound, more disturbing and grotesque than the noise of the death-watches—a human stir and murmur, probably started by the sound of the clocks. But the sounds were those of sleep, not of waking life. It was as if the spirits of those in the house, slumbering during the body’s activity, half awoke, and tried to pierce the silence around them. Amid a continual stir of restless movement, tossing and turning and creaking of beds, there began a low murmur from which at intervals a stray voice would emerge. Amber could hear Mrs. Darke talking, as she generally did in sleep, with a ceaseless monotony of self-expression. It was the reaction from her unnatural waking life. She who preserved all day an iron control of word and look and impulse committed herself all night. But even in unconsciousness she spoke with characteristic reserve, in a voice expressionless and secret. No one outside the room could ever have distinguished a word, and her husband, who might have heard, slept heavily and stertorously, his snores resounding through the walls. Amid Mrs. Darke’s indistinct babble and Solomon’s snores, Amber could hear Peter, whose door was ajar, grinding his teeth. This came at more or less regular intervals, and at other intervals, from the far end of the passage, came grandmother’s voice, thin but awe-inspiring, crying ‘Gideon!’ and ‘Jehovah!’ Only from Catherine’s room no sound ever came. Amber wondered what she herself contributed to this concert, and was smitten with silent, irrepressible laughter. But she became serious again when Ruby cried out in some dream terror. There was something wrong here, she felt, something sinister and unwholesome. Lost voices came along the tortuous passages, uplifted as if in complaint from amid murky dreams, and as if in baffled longing for some undiscovered good. Even so the nations sleeping, drugged by tradition, among the bones of their ancestors, stir restlessly and utter vague scattered cries, mutterings, a low lament, a sudden far shriek. The midnight house seemed like a graveyard where the tremendous ‘I say unto thee, arise!’ had been spoken and then revoked; where the dead stirred and uttered strange plaints and groanings, but could not cast aside their cerements nor rise up into the light of morning. Under the panic of the thought that they were like people in a vault, and that she and Jasper were the only ones alive, Amber fled along the passages to Jasper’s room. She heard as she came near, with great reassurance, his restless tramping, comfortingly commonplace. Its very wrathfulness and irregularity brought relief. He seemed to her like the watchman in some ancient lightless town, where goblin hosts crush in from every side upon the shelving air, which strains and is fissured under the weight of evil until, to the terrified people in their nightmare chambers under the threatened roofs, comes the watchman’s voice, querulous with reality, telling them that the night is cold and rainy.

Amber, with her mouse-coloured hair and her face grey with weariness, looked, as she stood in the doorway, wrapped in her brown dressing-gown, like the priestess of some occult worship. Jasper did not see her. At the moment when she came in he was kneeling in front of a little table on which he had placed a photograph of Catherine with a vase of flowers in front of it. In the shock of this discovery, Amber’s face at first expressed disgusted surprise, then, as she saw that he had, from very exhaustion, fallen into a doze on his knees, her look melted into pitiful love. At such times the intensity of her expression was so great that the outer self melted, like the crust of rock when fire breaks through, and was fused in the inner self. No matter what the face is, when the young spirit shines there exultant, it will be beautiful. For the spirit, the centre of the ego, is eternally vital, youthful, free. It has a thrilling life, never dreamed of by the earth-nourished body. So Amber’s face in these rare moments was beautiful as are few faces in this world of pale emotions. For Amber Darke was something of a mystic, though not exactly a religious mystic, nor that wilder, sadder creature, an earth-mystic. Sometimes she was deeply stirred by the beauty of Nature, but she did not live for it alone, as does the true child of the weeping god. Sometimes it was music that stirred her, or a stray sentence from the Bible, or the stars, or poetry; but most often it was the sudden rapture or the sudden pain of loving. Love would leap up in her at a chance touch of pathos in the most unpromising people. At these times she left the shallows of beauty that is heard and seen, and slipped out into the deep sea where are no tides of change and decay, no sound, no colour, but only an essence. In those waters nothing is but the spirit. She alone knows the immortal waste. She only, in a voice lamenting and sweet, cries across it as the curlew cries in spring. She only, circling above its darkling peace, eyes its mystery that haply she may find God.

Amber stood and looked at Jasper for a moment, then softly went away. She was bitterly disappointed to find Catherine thus enshrined as a divinity, when she herself had only asked to be as a servant. It was grievous to see her perception and love refused and herself rejected for one whom, she could not help thinking, had little to give. But stronger than her disappointment was her need of doing something practical for Jasper. For the mystic, whatever received opinion may say, is always practical. He arrives at his ideas more quickly than others, reaching the centre while they grope in a circle. And to grasp the essential is to be triumphantly practical. The world never credits the mystic with quick sight in mundane things, forgetting that, for his long gazing into infinity, better sight is necessary than for grasping obvious and clumsy facts. The mystic understands sex better than the sensualist. He can analyse malice, greed, hypocrisy, better than those who swim obscurely in their own black passions. A saint and not a devil can best unravel the psychology of evil.

Amber’s heart said: ‘Warmth and comfort!’ She remembered that Jasper had probably had no food all day. With careful haste she went down the shallow, creaking stairs, followed by sighs, indistinct words, coughings desolate as the coughing of sheep on the wide moors, welcomed in the hall by the stern ticking of grandmother’s clock and its growling, which was caused by some defect in its striking arrangements. In the kitchen the cuckoo defiantly announced the hour of one. This big, shadow-ridden place always filled Amber with panic at night. It was all so cavernous; the house seemed so haunted by broken voices. She hastened her preparations, hearing the autumn wind breathing beneath the door with the soft, long-drawn melancholy with which a horse sighs.

When she got back to Jasper, he was tramping up and down again, and the photograph was put away.

‘Hullo! What d’you want?’ he asked, in the unfriendly tone of those in stress of mind. But Amber knew that beneath the frown and the gruffness was a being who was very glad of sympathy. She saw his spirit like a little weeping boy, round-shouldered with vexation, backing into the darkest corner to avoid condolence, while watching with a concealedly eager eye for the following of love, for the outstretched hand and the carefully ordinary voice. She knew Jasper valued these things, for she had found by chance in his handkerchief drawer, carefully treasured, a letter she had once slipped under his door when he was in durance after falling foul of grandmother. She had comforted him then, so she could comfort him now; for whose nerves are more sensitive in trouble, who is more unreachable than a boy? She made a cheerful wood fire, put the kettle on and spread the little meal on two chairs. Jasper, interested in spite of himself, walked about in a moodiness that showed signs of disappearing when the ingratiating scents of tea and frizzled bacon filled the room.

‘Now, dear!’ announced Amber, conscious of recklessness, for in the atmosphere of Dormer endearments seemed out of place.

Warmed and comforted, Jasper spoke. Amber waited, breathless, for the long-desired talk about the events at college from Jasper’s point of view, for a word of illumination as to his own ideas; for—possibly—a touch of affection for herself. She loved both boys; but Jasper she idolized.

‘Don’t you think,’ said he, ‘that Cathy’s an angel?’

That Amber did not burst into tears argued a certain strength of character in her. That she lied cheerfully, heartily, and immediately, proclaimed her a great lover. For if there was a person on earth that Amber mistrusted, saw through and feared, it was Catherine Velindre.

‘So noble and above common things!’ went on the adorer, chumbling bacon with wholesome relish.

Amber clenched her hands.

‘Anyway, he likes his supper,’ she told herself. ‘You are very fond of Catherine, I know,’ she said aloud.

The room was comfortably reassuring, Amber receptive, but not inquisitive (curiosity is a weed-killer to young confidence). The barriers came down.

‘Fond, Ambie! Fond! I’d die a thousand deaths for her. I’m not good enough even to be her friend, and yet—’ his voice went from him in an undignified husk, for it is only in grand opera and in bird-land that the lover’s inmost heart is spoken with unwavering tunefulness. In the daily life of man huskiness hovers round the gates of expression with humiliating insistence, and the helpful lozenge is not always handy.

‘Jam?’ queried Amber practically. ‘You like strawberry.’

Jam acting as a demulcent, Jasper took up his tale.

‘I wish we were back in the old days, and I could gallop away with her colours on my helmet and tilt with everybody in her honour!’

His face was exalted, flushed with the embarrassment of self-expression, his dark hair ruffled. He looked younger than ever, and he always looked too young for his years. The idealist, if the world lets him alone, keeps his childhood until he dies. He only loses it if some great emotional tempest ravages his being to the depths, Amber thought: ‘He looks like a dear fluffy chicken!’ She said: ‘I’m glad you can’t. You’d get so knocked about. They always did.’

‘I want to do hard things for her.’

‘It seems to me that you have something quite hard enough to do—living here at Dormer with Peter put above you, and not quarrelling with him or with Ernest. Not giving in and yet not arguing, nor irritating them all.’

‘O Lord! What a life!’

‘If I were you, I should go out into the world.’

‘If she came too!’ His beautiful eyes had such a look of rhapsody and blazing passion that Amber, flushing, turned away. The old slumbering longings, the old unconquerable desires flamed up within her anew. No! She would never have a lover. Catherine, with her beauty; Ruby, with her abundant health—lovers were for them. But who would ever seek in Amber Darke, so still, of so sad-coloured an exterior, the creature of fire and tears that could feed a man’s heart with faery food and call him into Paradise with songs wild as those of hawks on the untrodden snowfields?

‘Of course,’ said Jasper, ‘you don’t know how a chap feels. But to me it would be heaven just to pile up everything I had in front of her—if I had anything worth giving.’

‘She’d take it,’ said Amber.

‘And hell would be—her misunderstanding me.’

‘You think she understands you now?’

‘Oh yes! She doesn’t approve, but she understands. She’s got such a lot of sympathy.’

‘H’m!’

‘As long as she believes in my motives, everybody else can go hang.’

‘I believe in you, Jasper.’

‘Do you?’ His tone was grateful, but indifferent.

Amber sighed audibly.

‘Would Catherine, now that they all think you so wicked, marry you?’

‘Marry me? Marry me?’ Jasper tasted the delicious, commonplace phrase as if it were new honey. ‘Marry me?’

All the flutes of the morning were playing fantasias in his head. How soft and persuasive they were! How sweet and maddening! They were like the birds in Dormer forest when the April madness had them under its spell. And Amber, commonplace, sisterly, dull, Amber had started them. He looked at her ruminatively. He had never, until now, thought of Catherine as his wife. He had dwelt upon her with the selfless imagination of a poet’s first love. Amber’s stray words had altered his whole point of view, as stray words will. Catherine Velindre would never again find the completely malleable metal with which she had been accustomed to deal. A hardening alloy had been introduced, and Catherine’s clever fingers would find their work no longer easy. Despondency fell again on Jasper.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe she ever would.’

He was once more wrapped in reserve; the flutes had made him shy, aloof. What should Amber know of them? What could she know of the music of passion? The cries of the Venusberg, so shrill and fierce, were not for sisters’ ears.

‘And you wouldn’t change your views, Jasper? Not even for her?’

Jasper’s chin came out. Immediately it seemed to Amber that her mother had impinged on their talk.

‘No! Not even for her!’ said Jasper. His face took on a sombre and forbidding look—a look that boded ill for his happiness. Then his eyes brightened.

‘But she wouldn’t ask it. She’s too large-minded. Although she’s very religious, she’ll understand that my way is right for me. She’ll be tolerant.’

‘Like Ernest!’ Amber said it with a smile.

‘Tolerant, great-aunt, tolerant!’ quoted Jasper. His mimicry of Ernest was so inimitable that Amber had to stifle her laughter in the pillow. She had a rare capacity for mirth. Her aspect of controlled gleefulness was continually apt, without notice, to break out into laughter as violent as that of Isoud of fragrant memory, who, as the naïve chronicle remarks, ‘laughed till she fell down.’ This whole-hearted laughter and the irrepressible humour behind it had stood her in good stead at Dormer. She had been known, in moments of grave family crisis, when the atmosphere was heavy and electric, and all minds were sternly exercised over a delinquent, to collapse into helpless and infectious laughter. Grandmother would speak of ‘the crackling of thorns,’ and Mrs. Darke would say, in her green-ice tone, ‘I hate a laugher!’ Catherine would merely look pained.

‘You know Ernest’s coming next week?’ asked Amber.

Jasper nodded glumly.

‘And I think, I’m afraid, he wants to marry Ruby.’

‘Great Heavens! Can’t it be stopped?’ Jasper spoke with such real disgust, as if at something unnatural and indecent, that Amber was again overwhelmed in laughter. But her eyes grew mournful when she thought of Ruby.

‘I’m afraid not,’ she said. ‘You see, they all want it, and Ruby’s such a child. She thinks of things like rings and dresses.’

‘Don’t you?’ Jasper was momentarily curious about his elder sister.

‘Oh, no.’

‘Would Cathy?’

‘No. She’s above that.’

What Cathy was not above remained unspoken; for at that moment the cocks began to crow down in the misty morning fields, and within the house the passing of time became audible; for the clocks struck in every room, and it was as if Time’s robe had rustled.

‘I must go,’ said Amber. ‘Sarah will be down soon.’

When she had taken back the supper tray and regained her own room, she looked at her face in the mirror. It gazed back at her, twenty years older for the night of watching. For perceptiveness and emotional beauty, even the gift of humour, must be paid for to the last drop of vitality. Hence the poet very often dies in early youth, the lover of humanity is smitten by disease, those who would be the Christs of the world have ‘faces marred more than any man’s.’

‘Ah, well! what does it matter?’ she thought. ‘Nobody notices what I look like.’

Yet the irony of the fact that, in growing nearer to the spiritual ideal hinted by her own face in childhood, she had lost the physical expression of it, was bitter. The spirit, after all its wild burning, had left her face not gaunt and riven (she would not have minded that) but commonplace. Her eyes should have been, according to poetic justice, clear pools for God and His tremulous retinue of shadowy woes and glimmering joys to lean across and watch their delicate reflections. But they were dull and sad. This is often so with minds of peculiar strength or tenderness. The world lays such heavy burdens on them that something must break. The soul is impregnable, so the body breaks. The people whose eyes are clear pools are usually those who, being completely vacant in soul, put all their vitality into physical well-being and have a good digestion.

She leant from her window into the twisted, ancient pear tree that grew round it, watching the yellow leaves floating, hesitant, to the wet, brown soil; hearing the late pears, left ungathered a day too long, falling with faint thuds, as their stalks, severed by damp and the slight frost, gave way one by one.

‘I must tell Enoch,’ she thought. For out-of-doors Enoch was the providence of the family, as Sarah was within. Amber lay down, but she could not sleep, seeing ahead of Jasper the rocks he could not see, the inevitable conflict that must arise when two entities wish to go linked through life, but are attracted to opposite paths.

‘I wish I didn’t know Catherine quite so well,’ thought Amber. ‘Perhaps I misjudge her.’

But cold, smooth as a well-cut mirror, changeless as fate, Catherine’s personality floated up before her. She heard the clash of wills, the baying of the pack of bitter thoughts, warped loves, disillusionments, despairs. The scene was laid for tragedy—not necessarily overt tragedy, but a drama of the spirit, more devastating, more searing. How was she, with her small strength, to avert it?

She heard Sarah wrestling with the bolts and shutters, and knew that the day had begun. From the pear tree came the courageous shrilling of a robin who, having breakfasted with alderman’s pomp on half a pear, intended to give his audience something handsome in the way of music. And from Dormer Woods away across the water an autumn thrush fluted pensively, like a voice calling from another world, the song of one of the elder gods out of the dædal forest.