Читать книгу The Grampian Quartet - Nan Shepherd - Страница 22

TEN

Dussie Enters on an Affair of Moment

Dussie had all this while been engaged on an affair of moment: to find someone for Martha to fall in love with. Happy herself, she longed to make her friend as happy, and knew only one way for doing it. But the men to whom she was introduced made little of Martha. She did not repulse them; but she seemed not to know that they were there.

‘I can’t get her to see,’ Dussie said.

‘Why should she see?’ Luke asked. − ‘No, she’s not too innocent. She’s not innocent at all. She’s integral. Herself. And a singularly rare self. It would be criminal to alter it.’

Philosopher though he fancied himself, he had fallen into the plain man’s error over Martha. He had made up his mind about her and was satisfied with that. She was the spirit made visible in flesh; tangible thought. He forgot that she was alive.

‘No man in his senses would want Marty changed,’ he said.

‘A woman in her senses would,’ retorted Dussie.

But Dussie did not get far that summer in the management of Martha’s affairs. In August she bore a son, who lived an hour. Dussie was very ill too, for all her splendid vitality.

Luke took it hard. He had wanted his son. But in her weakness Dussie became dearer. She made no lamentation over the dead child; but sometimes in the darkness, slipping from her bright defiant capriciousness, with low words that were maternal in their solicitude, she consoled him for his loss. He divined that in comforting him she comforted herself and loved her as he had never loved her before, this new tender Dussie, comforting him in the night.

When the winter session was in swing again she was ready for company. There were merry meetings in Union Street; but she refused passionately to have Macallister in the house again. The Greek statue glare. …

Luke laughed, and talked philosophy with Miss Warrender instead.

‘A most informative lady,’ he called her.

Martha had never lost her early fear of Miss Warrender. Less diffident now, she talked in company; but if Miss Warrender were present she sat mute, anxious and self-distrustful.

‘But why?’ persisted Dussie. She rather liked Miss Warrender herself. She talked so well − kept a conversation going. Martha, Dussie reflected, must be cured of this over-sensitiveness: now that she herself was growing well again it was time to resume that important undertaking to which she had vowed herself − the finding of someone with whom Martha could fall in love: but meanwhile it was pleasant to dissect Miss Warrender.

‘O shut up, will you!’ cried Luke from the other side of the fireplace. ‘Can’t you see that I’m engaged on a deathless work?’ He waved his sheet of paper, and read aloud:

‘Strange that the spirit’s infelicity

Should rob the world of beauty −

‘That’s deathless, but I can’t get any further.’

‘Didn’t know you were a poet,’ said Dussie.

‘Neither did I, until today.’

He mouthed the lines again.

‘That’s a magnificent opening for a man’s first sonnet, you know.’

He continued to write poetry. Magnificent openings that reached no conclusions. He had none of your young poet’s diffidence in showing them off. No hole-and-corner self-consciousness. He displayed his accomplishment gratuitously. Why not? Had he possessed a Cloisonné vase, a fine quartz crystal, a son, he would have showed them off with the same eager gesture. Like his faculty for verse, they were among the myriad enticements that life offers to the curious.

In spring he announced the advent of his first long narrative poem.

‘It’s about the Archangel Gabriel. He gets tired of hopping about heaven, so down he comes, moons about on earth for a bit and does a star turn.’

‘I don’t wonder − much more fun out of heaven,’ said Dussie.

‘Nonsense! More fun out of heaven? Fat lot you know about it. Much more fun in heaven than anywhere else. Isn’t it, Marty? Don’t you expect fun in heaven?’

Martha looked at him, a slow considering look. She was not an eager talker. I can wait, her willing silences implied; but her pauses were not hesitant, giving rather a sense of hoarded powers. Now she said, slowly:

‘Of course. There will be so much to discover.’

‘Of course! Hell’s the sort of place where everyone sits around with a teacup and wonders what on earth to say next. O, they’re a dull lot down in hell. Sensible. Everyone as like everyone else as ginger-beer bottles. Nobody with a mind of his own. Whereas in heaven you’ll have all the really interesting people, the cranks and eccentrics, the fanatics and fools, all the folk who aren’t afraid to be really themselves. No, my dears, there will be neither originality nor style nor humour in hell.’

‘I hope we’ll get some humour in heaven, then,’ said Dussie. ‘It would be awful to be serious all the time.’

‘Never you fear. Heaven isn’t serious. How do you imagine we could stand being as wise as we shall be if we weren’t able to laugh at ourselves? You take my word for it, a sense of humour’s a paradisal possession. It’s the liberating agency. You go crawling about under a heavy tombstone, suitably inscribed, Wife of the Above and all the rest of it, until suddenly one day you see how confoundedly funny it all is, and then you come out with a great shout of laughter at yourself, and hey presto! up you walk to the next ring of the circus.’

With his arm round Dussie, he began to declaim his lines.

‘What’s that?’ she asked. ‘The new pome?’

‘My latest and greatest. Wait till I tell you about it.’

Eager, impetuous, he spoke: as though the doings of the Archangel Gabriel were all that mattered in the world.

‘You see, he grew tired of heaven, because he wanted to know what God was really like to the people on earth. So he visited a man, and took him up to heaven. Tremendous experience for the man, of course, but that’s not what really matters. What really matters is what Gabriel discovered by taking the man up. But I’ve got them hung up between earth and heaven just now, and I can’t get any forrader.’

He swung into the lines again, chanting them, hypnotised with his own creation:

‘But the full certainty of understanding

Was his not ever. He had oft to go

Among the worlds, and knew their fierce demanding,

Sharing their troubled littleness, their woe

‘Not little. For only thus could he endure

Divinity upon him, and unfold

Its thousand-fold intensity. The lure

Of the worlds had called him and their tale untold.

‘So grew he, oft surrendering complete

And rounded silences and brimmed desire,

And chose bewildering war: but deemed it meet.

For though he had learnt the All, and might not tire

‘Of knowing it, he knew not yet the whole

Of those inconstancies and alterations

That dwell resolved in God. God of his soul

He knew the fulfilment, but-’

‘Luke dear, now listen,’ said Dussie firmly, climbing on his knee and covering his mouth with her hand. ‘Do you remember that we have a supper party tonight?’

‘Yes, of course,’ he answered, coming promptly out of his absorption. ‘Fraser and young Kennedy and the beautiful Mrs. K., mostly frocks and fal-la-la-la − what Marty’s mother would call with equal truth and eloquence a flee-up.’

‘Well. − Don’t be soulful in front of Mrs. Kennedy, Luke.’

‘I shall be myself, my love. If the self chances to be soulful, all the worse for the beautiful Mrs. K.’

Soulful the self chanced to be, the beautiful Mrs. K. notwithstanding. He discussed at length the scheme and purpose of his narrative poem and declaimed the complete contents of the manuscript.

‘If you’d cut out two-thirds of it and sharpen the rest, Luke,’ said young Kennedy, ‘you could make something of that.’

‘Cut out two-thirds! My dear fellow, there’s two-thirds yet to write.’

Kennedy grinned. With his Buchan accent he developed his criticism.

‘It’s like a half-hewn statue just now. Imperfectly disengaged from the block. You want to hew much deeper −’

‘My good youth, am I a hewer of wood and a drawer of water?’

He wrote his poetry easily. Like going to heaven, it was fun; and without the travail of his soul he was satisfied.

Martha spoke little during the supper party. She sat very quiet, smiling to herself with a still, shining smile. She was intensely happy. How Luke could take her secret thoughts and transfigure them! − as though she had not always known that when the angel visits the man the deeper spiritual experience is the angel’s. Since he had begun to write poetry (would he be as great as − oh, not Milton! one could not expect that − as Tennyson perhaps? or Mr. Yeats?) he had written nothing but had responded, like the vibration of a stringed instrument, to some tune within her own being. She did not look at him, but once or twice amid the nonsense he was talking he caught her eye. There passed between them a spark, swift, momentary, the flitting of a gleam, a recognition from their external and perfect selves.

Fraser called across the quadrangle next morning, ‘Hello, Luke, how’s the Archangel Gabriel?’ It became a three-weeks’ fashion to greet him with, ‘Hello, Luke, what’s the Archangel doing?’

The Archangel Gabriel remained in a parlous state between earth and heaven, and Luke was unable to extricate him from his plight.

‘After all,’ he explained, ‘light takes a few hundred years to make the passage. You can’t expect an Archangel to do it in a month.’

Doubtless the Archangel accepted the situation with grace and humour, that paradisal attribute. The only person to suffer seriously from the delay was Martha, who was passionately exercised over the climax of Gabriel’s experience. What did he discover about God? She wished Luke would reveal it; and brooding, devised conclusions for herself, even setting one of them, impatiently, to rhyme; though to tell the truth her verses were by no means as beautiful as her eyes had been when she tramped the Quarry Wood beating out the metre. Preoccupied thus, less than ever did she yield her inclinations to Dussie’s Cupid-mongering.