Читать книгу The Golden Arrow - Mary Webb - Страница 13

Table of Contents

Suddenly Mrs. Arden straightened herself, standing at gaze. A stranger was coming over the hill. He stopped by the signpost, seemed to make nothing of it, and came on towards her.

‘Can you tell me the way to Lostwithin?’ he asked.

‘Be you him as preached yesterday?’ parried Mrs. Arden.

‘Yes.’

She was taking him in. ‘A comely chap,’ she said mentally. He stood looking down at her amusedly, conscious of his good looks. Even his ‘up to date’ blue suit did not spoil his supple muscularity, though it was cut absurdly. He was smoking a briar pipe of enormous proportions.

‘Quite our Joe’s sort!’ commented Mrs. Arden.

‘Joe’s sort’ was, of course, young manliness personified, just as ‘Deb’s sort’ was perfect maidenhood, and ‘John’s sort’ something that brought tears to her eyes when she sat and thought her own thoughts in chapel.

‘The signpost doesn’t say much,’ he added.

‘Oh, that!’ she commented, with much scorn. ‘Nobody takes no notice of that. You canna go by signposses here, you mun go the way the hills ’ll let you. But them posses,’ she added, ‘they do for the counting councils to be busy about, painting the names and that. Else who knows what they’d be doing?—for a more mischievous set of men there never was! Besides, poor things, they want to seem to be doing something for their money like other folks.’

He laughed.

The two girls by the wood jumped, looked and sat mute, expectant.

‘And the way —?’ he reminded her.

She had made a resolve.

‘Now, it being so hot,’ she said persuasively, ‘what’d you say to a cup of tea?’

‘Well, I’m sure I’m much obliged, but — ’

‘Come you on,’ said she, with authority. ‘Come you on and set you down.’

‘Well, to goodness!’ breathed Deborah. ‘Mother’s bringing him here.’

Lily skilfully made the most of her front hair under the bonnet. She would see if she couldn’t cut Deb out, although her curls were gone.

‘Gawls!’ shrieked Mrs. Arden, while yet a long way off; ‘here’s some one as you both knows.’

For the second time Deborah’s eyes met those of the stranger.

‘Lily,’ said Mrs. Arden, ‘run and get some sticks while I fetch the water, there’s a good girl.’

She hustled Lily into the wood.

‘And so I’ve got my second chance,’ said Stephen Southernwood.

Deborah was silent.

‘I never saw a soul except you in chapel,’ he continued.

Deborah twisted her apron into a rope.

‘My name’s Stephen; might I ask yours?’

He had more ease of manner than anyone she knew, although he had not attained the absence of self-consciousness which the Lord of the Manor down at Slepe had gained (not without tears) at Eton, and which Joe had always possessed as a birthright. At present he was going through a strange experience; he was meeting his primitive self for the first time. It was a very shadowy self so far: but it was something quite different from ‘the nice young man’ who had caused such a stir among the ladylike drapery assistants in Silverton.

What had caused the change he did not know; was it the hills, the storm, the clear, still face beneath the darkened chapel window? Since yesterday Deborah’s face—vital, yet unawakened—had come before him in flashes, vivid and transient. This transience had stirred desire in him; he was ever for the fleeting rainbows of life, and what was denied he must possess. Her evident capacity for large life fascinated him, and the veil of sleep that was upon her fired him to a wakening onslaught like the sun’s upon a dim country. Life ceased to appear as a neat, correctly docketed arrangement of a little football, a little Huxley (to improve the mind), a little Sherlock Holmes (relaxation), a little religion (respectability). How it did appear he would have been ashamed to say. The drapery assistants had made him feel smoothly romantic. They themselves were smooth in manner, and they saw to it that in their presence life had no rough edges. The utmost propriety, the utmost glossing of facts was necessary in order to pass muster with them. They were cool, collected, conventional. He suddenly hated them and their smoothness. They had smoothed him also as a rolling-pin smooths dough. They had deferred this curious, electric, mad meeting with himself. He had sampled the pleasure of a kiss fairly often; but his world had been far removed from the forcible kisses of desire, the indecent snatching of the starving for bread, the hot struggle for existence. He had been detached and impersonal about the great facts of life; now they were hot and clamorous in his ears. He looked swiftly at Deborah, and immediately all that he had ever read about the embraces of lovers came into his mind as a poignant, personal matter. She turned her head away, for the look in his eyes was like a strong clasp of her. His thoughts galloped. He dragged at the reins, intuitively feeling such thoughts to be indecent in Deborah’s presence: but they were not to be stopped. They rushed on through the whole of human experience; it lay open to him as the countryside below did—vast, delicate, savage. Kissing ceased to be a game. It was a key to intenser life. The act of speech was no longer merely for courtesies, expressions of opinion, pleasantries. It was for demanding joy from the world, surrender from women. The hearth-fire, little houses, night, took upon them the magic that they wear for lovers. For the first time in his life he realized Death—the murderer of ecstasy. Rapture, relentlessness, force—these ceased to be words. They were manhood; they were himself. Tears, tenderness, pain—these were woman; these the woman who loved him would be and suffer in the glory of surrender, in the birth-pang. All these things—dim and half understood—flashed through his protesting mind, while Deborah sat, constrained and afraid to look round, gazing into the melting distance. A voice far down in Stephen’s being answered the whimbrel that called above. It summoned Deborah peremptorily; it shouted defiance at the hills, the world beyond, the intangible and therefore terrible depths of blue air. Out of the muddle of half-understood ideas, small wishes and conventions that had concealed Stephen Southernwood from himself sprang a creature direct and impulsive as the old gods—who took their way unknown and unhindered, claiming with a nod the love and tears of the witless daughters of men, themselves recking nothing of a love that is pain, only knowing a swift desire, shattering to the desired. So he entered into half his heritage—the physical glory of man. The other half was so far undreamed of.

‘Why do you look away all the time?’ he asked.

She turned her head with an effort.

‘Where d’you live?’ was the next question, direct to rudeness. Yet she felt a delicious homage in it.

She nodded sideways.

‘Upper Leasurs.’

‘Can I come to Upper Leasurs?’

‘Aye — no.’

He laughed.

‘You funny little girl!’

She had never been called little. She was indignant for a moment. Then she found it sweet. She felt happy and humble-minded as she did when they sang in chapel of sin and forgiveness.

‘I tell you what,’ said Stephen, ‘I shall come to Upper Leasurs and the rest of ’em whether you say I can or not.’

Deborah’s apron was a long, creased rag.

‘You’ve not told me your name yet!’

‘Deborah.’

‘Shall we go for a stroll in all that green and red stuff, Deborah? What’s it called?’

‘Wimberry wires.’

‘When they call us we won’t go.’

‘Mother ’ll holla till we do,’ said Deborah, matter-of-factly. But she went with him. For the first time in her life the heather was only a carpet, the sky only a roof. She walked between them in a shaken world, to a sound of shaken music. The whimbrel’s cry fell there like broken glass; and in her soul the crystal of her pride shivered into fragments.

Lily, who had been listening behind a stunted may-tree, stamped with rage, and was what Mrs. Arden called ‘almighty imperent!’

‘Why should I call them, Lily Huntbatch?’

‘It looks bad.’

‘Not as bad as you looked, in the dark of night, along of our Joe, with your dress only half done up.’

Lily was silent, but she thought ecstatically how she would try and capture Stephen, throw Joe over and be quits with Mrs. Arden.

‘Here they be, friendly as calves o’er a gate,’ said Mrs. Arden, forgetting her annoyance.

‘He’s a deal taller than Joe,’ said Lily; ‘head and shoulders.’

‘That he’s not! Joe’d be above his ear. I’ve notched him and Deb year by year on the door, and I know.’

Lily watched Stephen.

‘The chief among ten thousand!’ she murmured, with the cheap emotion of her kind—often mistaken for love, altruism, religious fervour.

‘You’re the chief of all gomerils, Lily!’ said Mrs. Arden. Then she surveyed Deborah.

‘Took for matrimony,’ was her comment.

‘I think it’s very vulgar,’ Lily remarked, ‘to talk about marrying and kids all the time like some do. I can’t see why a chap can’t talk to a girl without such things being thought of.’

‘No more do I. Only they dunna, you least of all. And as for vulgar, if such things be vulgar, then you and me and the greatest in the land, aye! even the ministers of God’s vulgar—for they’re all the signs that such things came to pass. And come to that,’ she added, rising to metaphysical heights; ‘come to that you’d call the Lord Himself vulgar, you wicked girl! For didn’t He plan it all out from the first kiss to the last christening? Answer me that, Lil Huntbatch!’

She gathered breath as Deborah and Stephen came up.

‘This is Lily Huntbatch, that’s walking out with our Joe,’ she announced.

The look Lily gave her was venomous.

‘Do you like walking out, Miss Huntbatch?’

‘Depends who with.’ Her bewildering smile was lost; he was looking at Deborah.

‘Your safety-pin’s undone, Deb,’ she snapped, ‘and your belt’s crooked.’

‘Here’s Lucy—after some tea, I suppose,’ said Mrs. Arden. ‘She’s terrible earnest for victuals, Mr. Southernwood, and she does credit to ’em.’

Lucy bore down on them.

‘Well, you are hot,’ said Lily, welcoming a victim for her anger.

‘I be that.’

‘And red in the face.’

‘I allus am.’

‘Your hat’s all collywessen.’

‘It do get like that.’

‘And your brooch is coming off.’

‘If I loses ’im, I loses ’im,’ said Lucy calmly.

Lily gave it up. If Lucy was too inert to mind about her brooch, given her by her only admirer at the age of twelve, with ‘Mizpah’ on its moonlike surface, she was invulnerable.

‘There, Lucy, my dear, you shall have a nice cup of tea.’ Mrs. Arden spoke protectingly.

‘Thank you kindly,’ Lucy replied, rapaciously and gratefully. ‘I’m sure I’m ready for bucketsful, the sweat’s poured off me till I feel right thin.’

At this remark Stephen was seized with uncontrollable laughter.

‘And he stuffed his handkerchief into his mouth,’ Mrs. Arden recounted to John afterwards, ‘and he rocks to and agen like me with the colic. I never seed anyone laugh like what he did. Eh! I like good laughers. Ill they may do, but they’re not bad-hearted—not if they laugh till it hurts ’em. And then Deb started to laugh, and I couldna help but join, and Lil—as had been sitting all the while like an owl with the face-ache—began to say “hee-hee!” very mincing-like, and poor Lucy (never knowing what it was all about) opened her mouth and bellowed, and the old whimbrels set up a din of laughing round about. You never heard such a noise in your life, father! and then all of a sudden the thunder came on and we were all in a pretty taking. And Stephen (he says I’m to call him by his given-name) remembered as he ought to have been at Lostwithin hours ago. He’d stayed the night at Wood’s End along of the storm. And he ran one way and we the other, and poor Lucy went lolloping whome, frittened to death. Deborah went awful quiet when it came on to thunder; and she says “Good-evening” very stiff to Stephen, as if she’d minded something agen him; and when we were coming back she says, “Mother, there’s summat foreboded.” ’

‘Aye, she said that yesterday.’

‘Well, better go the way of ’ooman, whatsoever’s foreboded,’ said Mrs. Arden. ‘Why, goodness! There’s Eli trapesing through all this rain. He’s come for Lil, sure to be.’