Читать книгу The Golden Arrow - Mary Webb - Страница 8

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Poised between the lowland and the heights and now cut out sharply against the coal-black east, like a hot ember in an oven, stood the red-brick chapel. Whatever beauty flowered within to sweeten the stark ugliness of it—creeping up the walls like swift summer vetches, reaching out determined tendrils towards the illimitable—none was visible without. It stood in a yard of rank grass where Thomas o’ Wood’s End lay in an open grave of baked earth. It was squat, with round-topped windows too large and too many for it, which caricatured those of Pisa Cathedral. Its paint was of the depressing colour known among house-painters as Pompeian red. The windows had black rep curtains and frosted lower panes to defend the young women in the window pews from the row of eyes that came up above the window-sills at dusk like stars, when the unrighteous outside stood on a ledge and pressed their faces to the glass. So the chapel stood amid the piled and terraced hills like a jibe. Above the door, with a nervous and pardonable shuffling of responsibility (apparently by the architect) were the words, ‘This is the Lord’s doing.’

Deborah and her father went in, he with the far look still in his eyes and his large hymn-book with the tunes in it under his arm. To him the place was beautiful, painted in the dim, gold-mixed colours of mysterious emotions, half-realized adventures. On the machine-cut patterns of the panes he had gazed while he dwelt upon the burning wheels of Ezekiel’s Vision, the Riders of Revelation. The black curtains had made a background for the cumulative tragedy of the Gospel. The jerry-built walls were gracious to him with the promise of many mansions. When they prayed he was always a syllable behind the rest, tasting each word, very emphatic, very anxious not to stress his request for one person more than for another. He sat now with his square, high-crowned old bowler on his knees, his red handkerchief spread on it, and the hymn-book open on the top, reading ‘The King of Love my Shepherd is,’ and seeing with a vividness denied to the lettered and the leisured those illumined pastures and unwrinkled waters where, simple and wise, the central figure of the fourth Gospel presided.

Deborah looked round surreptitiously and nudged her father.

‘There’s our Joe! Whatever’s come o’er him? Oh, I see! There’s Lil too.’

Joe was broadly radiant. In his buttonhole was an enormous passion-flower, presumably bought for the occasion in the Saturday market; Lily had another, which spread its mystic tracery of purple rings, green and gold flames and blue rays on her passionless breast with silent irony until it withered and she threw it on the manure heap. Lily had trimmed her hat with poppies and corn; one bunch had come loose and drooped over her glinting hair—loose also, and tinting her forehead with creamy gold. She always swayed when she sang, and to-day she looked more reed-like than ever. As the flowering rush in the marsh with its brittle beauty cries to be gathered, so she, with her undulating, half-ripe corn and falling poppies, aroused in the back row of youths such untranslatable emotions that they forgot to place the usual pins for the dairymaids from Long Acre Farm.

The first hymn was over, and still the preacher, who was to conduct the service, had not come. Deborah wondered idly what he would be like and whether he would eat jujubes all the time, as the last visiting preacher did—a practice which, while the jujube was new and ungovernable, resulted in a private interview between himself and the Almighty, since no one could hear what he said. She remembered how, in an earnest moment, he swallowed one whole, and how the horrified silence was only broken by the sullen bluebottles that could not understand the swing panes of the windows. There was silence now, with shuffling and coughs.

At last there came a sound of quick steps; the door flew open and a man entered—so tall that he dominated the place. His ruffled hair was as gold as Lily’s; his excited blue eyes, bright colour and radiant bearing were ludicrously unsuited to his black clothes. Out in the early shadows with a fawn-skin slung from one shoulder, and a flute on which to play short, tearless melodies, his vitality would not have seemed so unpardonable. He was up the chapel in three strides, and the service had begun. After a time Deborah found herself kneeling with crimson cheeks, no breath, and the knowledge that she could not look at the preacher.

‘What’s come o’er me?’ she whispered to herself. She secretly mopped her face and the palms of her hands; this was observed by Lily, who knelt very straight and gazed through her fingers at things in general, but chiefly at the apparition who was praying for soberness and pardon in the tones of a lover serenading his mistress. When he began the oration, he spoke of death as a child does—quite unable to believe in his own skeleton, coolly sorry for those who were weak enough to suffer such indignity. He was full of the eloquent comfort of one who has never seen the blank wall that rises between the last tremor and the eternal stillness on the beloved’s face. He was so sure of himself, God, and the small shell that was his creed, that Mrs. Thomas—who had felt numb since the hollow on the other side of the bed had been vacant—began to cry. Lily also cried—from excitement, and because Lucy Thruckton would insert her twelve stone of good humour between Lily and the new preacher.

Deborah felt a gathering sense of desolation which, if she had been able to analyse her emotions, she would have known to arise from a new sense of dependency—a disturbance of poise. Towards the end of the service the growling in the east changed to a roar; rain came like a high tide on the black windows; the young preacher stood in a flicker of lightning as though he were haloed for glory or smitten for doom.

After the service they all crowded into the porch and waited for it to clear.

‘Now, Joe!’ whispered Lily, ‘ask him!’

Joe looked reverently but mistrustfully at this new manifestation.

‘Mister!’ he began. ‘Lily wants to know—’ He paused, arrested by the rage in Lily’s face. ‘Leastways, I want to know if you can come along of us to Lammas Fair and keep our Deb company?’

‘The lad’s gone kimet!’ whispered John to Deborah, who was twisting her fingers in dumb misery. The preacher was surprised: but he was sufficiently educated to take a conscious interest in his new neighbours; and he was town-bred, and very excited about country life.

‘I should like to, awfully,’ he said, with an enthusiasm little to Joe’s taste, ‘if you’ll introduce me to the lady.’

‘Deb!’ called Joe across several heads, in the voice with which he ‘Yo-ho’d’ the cattle; ‘this gent’s coming along of us to Lammas Fair, so you needna be lonesome.’ He felt pleased. The task was over; the walk arm-in-crook was to come. He wiped the perspiration of initiative from his forehead, unaware of a storm worse than the thunder which was to break on him from the united displeasure of Deborah and Lily.

Deborah, so summoned, could do nothing but come forward. With an effort she lifted her eyes to the preacher’s and spoke with dry lips the correct formula: ‘Pleased to meet you, I’m sure!’

He said nothing, but stood looking down at her with such frank admiration as even a bridegroom in this countryside does not vouchsafe to his bride; and with a light in his eyes that would have been considered ‘Most ondecent,’ if the onlookers could have found a name for it. As it was, they merely fidgeted, while Deborah and the preacher gazed at one another and were intoxicated with a joy new to her though not unsampled by him.

‘A fortnight come Tuesday you be at Lane End at ten sharp,’ said Joe, quite carried away by his own savoir faire.

Lily raged inwardly. She was hemmed in by Joe, who could not be made to understand by all her whispers and pinches that he was to introduce her. She trod on his toes with concentrated rage; but his boots were proof against anything lighter than the hoof of a carthorse. She peered round Joe and saw Deborah as none had yet seen her—dissolved in the first tremulous rose-tints of womanhood. She dodged Joe’s arm and saw Stephen Southernwood with an expression no woman had yet called up in his face—homage and demand in one. ‘Cat!’ she whispered, surveying Deborah again. She dug Joe in the ribs with her sharp little elbow.

‘Ow!’ said Joe.

Meanwhile John surveyed the scene with impartial affection, and the dairymaids murmured seductive ‘Don’t-ee-nows’! At last the rain ceased as at a signal; steam rose in the sudden yellow light; and they all went home down honeysuckle lanes, across the ridges and round the purple hill-flanks to milk, make love and have their Sunday tea.