Читать книгу While Rivers Run - Maurice Walsh - Страница 22

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“You have not yet told me,” Alistair insisted, “what one finds absorbing in this countryside—I nearly said this neck-of-the-woods.”

“You are persistent. First I had to get your viewpoint, and you certainly did not hesitate to drive it home. You make me feel quite humble, and I doubt if I can pierce you to the heart.” Margaret rose from her knees and faced him, crumpling in her hands some flimsy garment that she would have been sorry to crumple had she known she was doing so.

He looked down his nose at her, and admired the light of thought in her eyes, and the way her shoulders moved within the thin silk of her dress.

“Yours is a young country,” she said tentatively.

“Old as yours, is it not?” he retorted perversely, though he knew what she meant.

“Yes, yes! But most of it—all of it except parts of Mexico and Peru—and Yucatan, say—was practically an unpeopled wilderness until the beginning of last century. Raw! Any life that moved in it brutish—animal merely—and non-cultural entirely. Mind left no mark on it. A land untoned by any contact with man the thinker. A wilderness where man was either thrown back on himself and went mad, or became absorbed in the unhuman savagery of nature.”

“I can’t say that I ever felt——”

“You were only after sport—a sojourner. You did not live there, and the wilderness had not time to claim you. Is it not true that there is more natural ruthlessness amongst your wild men than amongst——”

“Steady on! Your own Highland records show some hefty smiting.”

“Y-e-s!” she agreed slowly, “with a difference. But let me stick to my point. I want to contrast your young land with this old one that has been peopled for ten thousand years—or thirty thousand. It has been closely peopled too, and has absorbed the mentality of many races. Man is no longer himself here. He belongs to the place. There is some subtle evocation—aura is better—some subtle aura of old times and old ways, old wisdoms—old wickednesses also—that affect and claim a man: that are wholly satisfying and make life intensive in spite of all external sameness.”

“Something in that——”

“And let me tell you that it will get you too if you are sib, as we say—and in race you are. Anyone it has ever claimed it has surely held, as it once held a dying man ten thousand miles away.” And then in a low voice she recited Stevenson’s poignant lines:

Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying,

Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now,

Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying,

My heart remembers how!

Grey recumbent tombs of the dead in desert places,

Standing stones on the vacant wine-red moor,

Hills of sheep, and the homes of the silent vanished races,

And winds, austere and pure;

Be it granted me to behold you again in dying,

Hills of home! and hear again the call,

Hear about the graves of the martyrs the peewees crying,

And hear no more at all.

“I know,” whispered Alistair. “It held that man beyond doubt.”

Both were silent for a little while, and both were touched. Then Margaret shrugged her shoulders and wrinkled her nose boyishly. The garment crumpled in her hand she smoothed ruefully, and laid with a patting motion in the suit-case. “That’s about all,” she remarked. “Uncle will fix the straps.”

“Sorry I can’t do that.”

“So am I. He is a terror with straps—but perhaps all men are?”

“Sure. The hole higher up is a dare to a fellow.”

A motor-horn hooted outside, and Margaret, with a deft toe, flicked shut the lids of the suit-cases and ran them under the dressing-table. “Your friends from Highland Drum,” she said. “You’ll be glad?”

“Not so very,” he said, whimsically doleful. “The air is too blame murky.”

“You’ll see your way all right,” she encouraged him. “Say little and plead a head. I must have given you one.”

“Not ever,” he denied.

She shook back a curl and was out of the room in one quick movement, leaving the door ajar behind her.