Читать книгу The House in Dormer Forest - Mary Webb - Страница 9

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Amber was late for prayers. These were an institution at Dormer. It seemed to Amber that every one was unwillingly obliged, for fear of every one else’s displeasure, to take part in them. Even Enoch’s cousin, Marigold, was under orders from Mrs. Darke to attend and be saved, because she worked daily at Dormer. His aunt, Mrs. Gosling, however, who only put in a few hours’ work each week, might presumably absent herself and be damned. Enoch Gale himself, in spite of all representations, steadfastly refused to hear the Word. He was put down as ‘simple’ by every one but Sarah, who would say to him on Ash Wednesday or Good Friday: ‘Well, we’ve bin through a long sitting to-day. Nigh on half an hour. There’s more sense at the back of them calf’s eyes of yours than a body ’ud think, Enoch!’

She hoped that these veiled compliments would lure Enoch to commit himself as to his reason for avoiding prayers. Mrs. Velindre said it was secret sin, but Sarah scouted this, saying: ‘He inna ’cute enough to sin.’ Enoch never committed himself, being, facially and vocally, as immune from self-expression as a young owl. It was quite useless for Mrs. Darke to send for him, and say: ‘You are expected to attend prayers, Gale,’ or for grandmother to add: ‘Watch and pray, Gale!’ When Solomon said: ‘D’you hear the missus, Enoch?’ he replied, ‘Ah, sir, I yeard the missus.’ But next day, as usual, he failed to watch and pray.

This morning Jasper was also absent, and there was more nervous tension than usual as the family watched Amber’s flurried entrance.

Sarah and Marigold sat apart like lepers on the other side of a stretch of neutral-tinted carpet. Solomon read the Bible in the gruff, protesting voice of a man of action confronted by literature. Every day he gave them a chapter, and said the same number of prayers. But he was not the kind of man to make such gatherings seem a mystic meeting of all the wistful souls in the House of Life. There are some beautiful and benignant personalities that can do this, glorifying even a function which has been spoilt by respectability. They can infuse into the forms of Christianity so grave and sweet a loveliness, as to allure the mind—even a mind that knows them to be weaving dreams on the loom of legend, preaching the Godhead of Christ as the old alchymists preached the elixir of life.

On Sundays Solomon went once to church. Once a month he attended ‘the second service.’ On ordinary occasions he put a shilling in the offertory; at Christmas, half a crown; at Harvest Thanksgiving, gold. He was considered a good Churchman, and a good business man. He had been a land agent, but had retired on his father’s death to the ancestral house of Dormer. Perhaps the most lovable thing about him was his honest indifference toward every member of his household except his two setters.

‘Praise Him in His name Jah!’ read Solomon, unconsciously hurrying and blurring the words a little, as the suave scent of hot bacon stole in from the kitchen. Sarah was the only person who showed any interest in the remark, and she spelt the divine cognomen with an ‘r.’ Amber observed that Ruby was asleep, that her mother was busily tearing an envelope into small pieces, that Sarah was chumbling coffee berries, to which she was partial, and that Peter was staring at the isolated Marigold with extraordinary fixity. Marigold’s cheeks, always of a bright cherry laid very definitely on the cream, were much pinker than usual, and her whole body drooped. Her eyes had a curious expression for which Amber could find no name. Peter looked older than his years. His rather hawk-like and fierce face had lost its round boyishness, and his quick, imperious dark eyes were those of the born adventurer. Brought up in an atmosphere of things outworn, sent to a school where the same atmosphere brooded, he could find no outlet. He was possessed of the same passion as his mother for impressing his personality on something or somebody, only his mind was not yet warped. But no one had ever told him of the great adventures of the soul; of the trackless paths of imagination; of philosophy and its brave search for truth; of love and its golden abnegations, its supreme rewards. Peter would have made a martyr for any cause that had enough life in it. He was full of the defiant ‘I will,’ which in unity with ‘I love,’ moves mountains. But his temperament, his abilities and budding promise, had not been discovered or treasured, so he lounged about at home, full of urgent, aimless vitality, and spent the moments of enforced stillness at prayers in staring Marigold out of countenance. This morning Amber noticed that while Peter stared at Marigold, Catherine was watching Peter, intent, yet guarded, with an occasional glance to spare for Marigold, who seemed almost to writhe under Catherine’s aloof, cold, virginal glance, strongly tinctured with criticism. Once Peter caught Catherine’s eye and scowled; but she met the scowl with a half smile.

‘Let us pray!’ said Solomon, and they all went down, with more or less grace, on to their knees.

When the others knelt, grandmother remained seated, like a stone idol which is immune, through its very stoniness, from human movement. It was understood that grandmother could not kneel. Only grandmother and her Creator knew that not her knees but her pride of years deterred her from this religious exercise; that, in fact, she did not choose to kneel. This remaining upright amidst a grovelling family gave her a satiric glee. Her gaze, travelling over the kneeling figures, seemed to say: ‘Don’t you wish you were older?’ She triumphed in the fact that her daughter—even she, the cold, the dreaded—humbly knelt, while, by an unsuspected artifice, she herself escaped. She enjoyed her leisurely scrutiny of shoulders and backs of heads, noticing with secret amusement that Ruby’s blouse was undone, Amber’s hair untidy, Rachel’s quite white over the ears. She perceived also that Sarah sat on her heels instead of kneeling (she often spoke to Sarah about this, but without effect), and that Peter was making ‘mice’ with his handkerchief, to the delight of Marigold.

Serene above the array of backs, Mrs. Velindre was also able, in her leisurely privacy, to have an occasional game of solitaire, for which she had a passion. She made this right in her own eyes by telling herself that she was simply passing the marbles through her fingers as nuns handle their beads, only without the wickedness of Rome. The lugubriousness of some of grandmother’s Amens was not due, as Amber once pityingly thought, to a sense of the tragedy of age, nor, as Sarah thought, to indigestion. It was due to the game going badly. Amber knew the truth now, for since grandmother had decided to sit next the lamp (for the better management of the marbles), her shadow had utterly betrayed her to the two girls sitting near her, and had gone grotesquely mopping and mowing—coal-black on the dun carpet—like a long-armed imp, first to the feet of Amber, and then to the feet of Catherine, while the marbles made themselves elongated shadows, like little pillars. Amber never divulged this, though she longed to share with Jasper a joke that made her crimson with laughter night after night. Catherine’s silence had a different motive. She regarded such chance bits of knowledge as so many trump cards to be kept for moments of need. She was not at all amused, but slightly irritated, that grandmother should consider her foolish ruse successful.

Amber wondered, as her father went through the usual prayers, in the usual way, what they were all there for. When they all joined in a prayer, their voices seemed to her so discordant—tuned by duty and not by love, each going loudly on its own way—that she was reminded of a dog show. She was sorry for a God who was compelled, every day at eight, to hear this, infinitely multiplied, when He might have been listening to trees or running water, or the song of birds created for joy.

‘Amen!’ said Solomon, with a note of triumph, and in a moment, as by a conjuring trick, all except Sarah and Marigold were in their chairs, eating.

Mrs. Darke poured out coffee as remorselessly as if it were poison. Perhaps she was bored with the multitude of cups, but she never accepted help.

‘What about Jasper?’ she asked, when the cups had gone round.

Jasper looked nervous. He hated these family discussions that always came at meals. He had manœuvred to sit by Catherine. This was Amber’s ‘place.’ Everybody at Dormer had a ‘place,’ and it was sin to take it. Amber, however, said nothing, but sat down by grandmother. This position no one coveted, as grandmother emphasized her wishes by a very sharp elbow in the side of her neighbour.

‘Well?’ said Mrs. Darke sharply.

Solomon looked at his eldest son ruefully.

‘I dunno,’ he said.

‘What’s he to do?’ asked his wife.

‘I don’t see that he can have the place now. I can’t take it off Peter.’

‘From, Solomon!’ Mrs. Darke spoke with exasperation.

‘From!’ echoed grandmother, in a cautionary tone, addressing the lumps of sugar that she was drowning in her cup. When she did this, her parchment face had an expression that might have been worn by a medieval lady drowning another lady in the moat.

‘Seeing that Peter’s gone straight, and Jasper’s gone crooked,’ added Solomon. Jasper, looking at Peter’s self-righteous expression, wanted to spring at him. The two young men, with their straight, rather Egyptian profiles, glared at one another across Catherine’s head, gracefully bent. They always seemed to be one on either side of Catherine. This morning the three of them made a striking frieze, like one on an ancient vase, Catherine managing to look like gracious femininity between two types of predatory manhood.

‘But Jasper will go into the Church,’ she said softly. ‘He won’t disappoint us all.’

‘He can’t if they turn him out of college,’ said Peter, with a loud laugh.

‘He can go to another college,’ murmured Catherine. ‘He can retrieve his mistake.’

‘Retrieve! Ha! Good girl!’ said Solomon, feeling at home with the word.

‘I wish you’d talk to me and not at me,’ remarked Jasper.

‘Why not go for the Army?’ asked Solomon.

‘Fight the good fight,’ added Mrs. Velindre.

‘Die for your country!’ Peter put in.

‘Not die, Jasper!’ cried Ruby, with great concern. ‘No, you must live and get very fat, like the old sergeant at the Keep, and wear a medal, and remember battles a hundred years ago.’

Mrs. Darke looked as if she thought dying for some respectable object was the only thing left for Jasper to do.

‘Well, my lad,’ suggested Solomon, ‘suppose we buy you a commission?’

Catherine silently turned her eyes on Jasper, and his pale, regular face suddenly reddened, like a statue in a stormy sunrise.

‘I’d rather stay at Dormer, father,’ he said.

‘He’s afraid!’ shouted Peter, and received, above Catherine’s head, what Sarah would have called a clout.

In a moment Peter was on his feet, his chair upset with the violence of his rising.

Sarah, who came in at that moment to ‘gather for washing-up’ afterwards remarked to Marigold:

‘The young gentlemen’s ravening sore; like two furious cats they be. I never saw the like!’

‘I’se reckon Master Peter’ll be king o’ the midden if it comes to fisses,’ remarked Marigold.

‘Wringing clothes gives you a very red face, Marigol’—a very red face it does. Maybe, it’s your ’eart!’ Sarah spoke with fine irony.

In the dining-room the storm had been quelled by Solomon’s command, and the conversation continued in a highly electric atmosphere.

‘If he stays, he’d better work at Arkinstall’s,’ said Mrs. Darke.

‘What for?’ asked Solomon. ‘I can’t set him up as a farmer.’

‘To earn his keep,’ said his mother.

‘In the sweat of his brow,’ added grandmother. She felt that this work, which Jasper was known to detest, would be a fitting judgment from the Lord.

‘But I don’t want to be a farm labourer!’ Jasper was dismayed.

‘No. The lad must have a respectable trade,’ said Solomon, who had some rudimentary ideas of fairness. ‘You’d better be a land agent, boy.’

‘But I’ve no gift for such things, father. Can’t I go on with my books?’

‘If you go into the Church.’

‘Never!’

‘Jasper!’ Catherine’s voice was caressing. ‘Jasper! Think how much good you could do.’

‘It’s useless to argue, Cathy.’

‘She’s a sensible girl,’ remarked Solomon.

‘I thought,’ Jasper spoke hesitatingly, ‘I could get a job at the Keep, and bicycle there every day.’

‘I can’t be thwarted!’ grandmother suddenly broke out. She had a theory that, if crossed, she would die. She was fond of saying: ‘I’ve got a weak ’eart, Rachel!’—dropping her ‘h’ not because she could not aspirate it, but because she did not see why, at her age, any letter of the alphabet should be her master. She said it now, adding: ‘In the sweat of his brow. It is the judgment of the Lord.’

‘But can you stand such hard manual work, Jasper?’ asked Amber.

‘He looks remarkably well,’ said Mrs. Darke. She had said the same at the deathbed of each of her early wilting sisters, for she was that curio which one meets very frequently—a stoic to the pain of others.

‘Take it or leave it,’ said Solomon, getting up. ‘Board and lodging and training at Arkinstall’s, or—get out.’

Jasper opened his mouth to say he would get out. But Catherine, with a slanting look shot with green fire chill as ice, caught his glance in a cold spell, as the sirens caught the ships of lost mariners. Stranded and fascinated, he felt as the weaker does in the presence of the strong, that there was only one thing to do. Catherine’s thin lips slid into a smile that made a dimple in her right cheek; her hair had a living and conquering ripple, with a sheen like copper-coloured armour.

‘I never could have believed,’ thought Jasper to himself, his eyes dwelling on her face, ‘that anything could be so white and so warm at once—except a rose, a hedge-top rose, out of my reach.’

Then, realizing that Peter was in ecstasies of laughter, pointing at them with a shaking finger, he forcibly withdrew his eyes, and said simply:

‘Arkinstall’s, then, so be it.’

‘Amen,’ said grandmother.