Читать книгу White Narcissus - Raymond Knister - Страница 7

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At this moment something made Richard Milne aware of a stirring in the room behind them. There was still light enough to show the figure of a woman, that woman who was sinister in his mind by very reason of her appalling and helpless misery. Her tall form bent over a vase of white narcissus. Other vases of the glowing white flower lent a distilled radiance to the dusk of the room. It seemed, though the window was down, that a sickly, heavy odour came spreading impalpable through the air. Richard seemed to be stupefied by it, and kept his watch in fascination; but the woman inside appeared unconscious of everything but the flowering bulbs. Her fingers caressed a blossom, and she passed to the other side of the room to look at a bulb just breaking into bud, with a slow, trembling shake of the head. She gazed a long time at this one, and long at one wilting with the accomplishment of its short life. She turned at last and passed into another room, opening and closing the door in silence peculiarly a summation of her white face.

He felt and heard a sigh at his cheek. 'She can't have heard us....' The window was darkened by the Virginia Creeper.

'You speak as though nothing could be more terrible than her hearing us,' he replied aloud. 'As a matter of fact, it would probably be one of the best things which could happen if they overheard us—both of them—discussing them in the harshest and least sympathetic manner.' His own surprised misgiving at the urgency of these words was only equalled by hers. She was struck silent in a way which made patent the effort with which she began speaking again.

'She has always loved the narcissi.' Ada's cadence on that word 'loved' was enough to show that her fear was well grounded, and that pity could drain her soul. Instead of seeing an unreal, almost delusive quality in the situation, as one fresh from the sane world, she appeared to conceive of no other reality beyond this abnormal state of affairs. She accepted wholeheartedly the fact of her mother and her mother's state, where one unobsessed would have implied, for all its gravity, a lightness of reservation.

'I remember,' he assented heavily, with an accumulation of unspoken criticism in his tone. 'But how does she endure them? A bulb or two is nice to have, if you like them, but such a number, with their enervating odour, must be intolerable to anyone else.'

'But she likes them, worships them. She seems to think of nothing else from day to night. She looks at them, cares for them, she has some of them beside her when she sleeps, and first thing in the morning she comes downstairs to look at the others. I have known her to get up in the middle of the night to come downstairs to the sitting-room and look at them. Sometimes she will fall in a reverie over them, and I can scarcely call her away to a meal.'

'Yes, she must be fairly fond of them,' he assented grimly. 'But how do you stand it? It must get on your nerves, doesn't it, day after day?' He was consciously trying to arouse her. 'To say nothing of the smell. And she keeps the windows closed all the time?'

'Yes, nearly all the time.... Sometimes I plead with her, but I think it does no good, it does harm. She becomes secretive, and starts when I come into the room and she is with them.'

Richard was almost ready to feign such brutality as casual curiosity would dictate. 'It's pathological,' he muttered. 'Should be looked into.'

'They've always been so much to her, a refuge for her yearning, since I seem inanimate and averse. And—more now—— And then——' He could see that she was struggling with the obviousness of some feeling which was obscurely trying to make her refer to her father.

Richard Milne smiled bitterly at the conception of her as inanimate and averse, but he said:

'And your father still means more to her than she admits or knows, though she would cut her heart out to be rid of him——' There was a weary flippancy almost of cynicism in his utterance, as of one arming himself with brusqueness against too many torturing perplexities. And again there was an upward inflection here suddenly warily deceitful, though he would not openly question her; for while he knew the outward circumstances of this quandary, never yet had he known Ada Lethen to talk about it in the way he wished, as though she expected or even hoped that he could understand.

'That is to be expected,' she answered, with a tinge of coldness, 'seeing the source of it all. Had it been any ordinary quarrel which tempted them into declaring in the frenzied tones I remember, that they would never speak to each other again—the bitterness might have, it must have lapsed, passed away in the lukewarm tolerance with which most people must regard each other.'

It came to him that she was a stranger to the warmth and coolness of ordinary domestic relations and family intercourse. An uncanny thrill was imparted with her words, as if they had embodied an exercise of intuition on the part of an immigrant from another planet, but hardly inured to the life of this; and he could have wept to think of that little girl.

'You—you were present at the quarrel, the original one?' He dared not ask, and yet he must.

Yes, she told him. The child had sat at the head of the stairs, shivering in her nightgown, and she heard it all. The raised voices went on for hours, and, as in the height of a storm, it always seemed that violence could reach no further pitch and these emotions would come to outrageous ends. 'I'll never forget how I shivered, and my heart went when I thought they meant to kill one another. But at last I fell asleep there.' She went on with added constraint in her tone, 'And there I was in the morning.' They had passed her, the woman to her room, the father to get his coat in the hall. Neither had touched the child, though they had passed so near as almost to step over its insensible form.

His arm went out to her again. 'Poor little thing! I'm afraid I can never understand all that your childhood was; only pity. But what you say does not tend to make me pity—these people. Quite the contrary.'

In an instant, while he sat there unmoving, unchanged in aspect, a flame of rage had wrapped him as a tree may be robed in fire, leaving him for the moment gripped helpless and listening only half-consciously to her words.

'You shouldn't pity me,' she murmured, and continued, 'It must have been that, perhaps, rather than my rational intelligence, which taught me to be cold to both of them. Perhaps if any love for either of them had been left afterward my heart should have been broken. As it is——' She laughed bitterly.

'You know that as it is I am heartless.' Yet this speech and the eyes with which she looked at him as she said it made Richard Milne wonder and hope. Clearly there had been a change, and she must have learned in his absence to admit to herself whether or not she loved him. The thought was enough: with mounting surety he felt that she did love him, that this was the time appointed—that surely he and Ada Lethen would not let go the chance of happiness without a struggle. If only it were just a matter of duty. But it was not. For so much of her life she had been bound to this place and to these slowly petrifying people that she could not imagine herself apart from them.

Perhaps the knot of the whole difficulty lay there. Desperately as she might yearn, he felt that she could not conceive happiness. Perhaps nothing but the death of one of those parents would bring her awake—alone—drive her to living.

'Your heart was too tender for such storms. It makes me wild to think of it—to think of your sitting there, hearing——' The vividness of the picture he saw caused him to wince away from its unbelievable pathos, its meagre sharpness, like the outlines of a remote folk-story, suddenly quickened to life by the lips of one of its participants.

'I think I could repeat every word,' she said quietly. 'They—each thought the other unfaithful. They proved that each was certain, no matter how much the other denied it, and that they would be obliged by every human consideration to hate each other to the end of life. And they have never spoken to each other since.'

'Never?' He mused with what seemed an idle particularity. His mind had accepted the fact long since, so that it did not occur to him to brand this inveterate silence as insane and foreign to humanity. Everyone in his boyhood world had accepted it.

Night had set in, wild as autumn; out in the open wind tore the darkness, the trees sighed loud, and colour was given to strain. Among the sheltered recesses of the lawn, about the thick evergreen trees, the hedge, and the veranda, the occasionally flawed quietude allowed the mind, lulled and affrighted anew, to return again and again to the turbulence without. A cricket or crickets took up their cry, silenced, and returned. What portion could there be, what human portion, but a strife of futility, meaningless turmoil? To watch it was to be lulled, only to hear were peace; and he looked at her face, hoping to hear her voice go on, sweetening the acrid past. But she said nothing, the moment was gone; and on the flood of many remembered longings and resolves surged back his single intent.

'Ada!' he burst out. 'This is absurd. For anyone who could do that, much as I might ultimately pity them, it's impossible to find excuse or condolence. To pamper them emotionally all this time is ridiculous. As your parents they will receive my respect; not otherwise, I assure you. You know as well as I that unless some definite course is undertaken nothing can be hoped.

'A course! What course?' she half moaned.

'But,' he adjured her, 'if you let things take their own way there is bound to be a great deal of trouble and bitterness. You will find that you have acquired nothing for the furnishing of your life but sorrow and the memories of sorrow. You are even farther removed than my own ideals are from the dogma of to-day. That arrivism, opportunism, at best only cloaks the thirst for getting which is rendering barren the lives we see everywhere. Materialism. Yet in a degree we've got to recognize that it is based on the reality which is foundation to material things. People get it reversed and think that material things are the only basis of reality. But it is our destiny: we are bound to conquer. We must subdue things; we've got to take from life even the emotions, the experience, and fulfilment we need. If we shirk that we are doing a wrong as great as that of starving in the midst of nature's abundance.' Words had betrayed him again. He did not know whether she were listening.

'There's no use talking, sacrifice is all right. It is part of the acceptance of life. Calmness and freedom from inordinate grasping is good. But the fact which you and I have to face right now is that happiness is not offered for ever in this world, it does not go begging; and we have a right to all of it we can make, a duty to ourselves which is imperative and primary, and only the fruition of which enables us to do a duty to others.'

She said nothing. He knew that she agreed with him, and that her agreement would make no difference. She was not to be aroused by the acrimony of the first part of his harangue, nor by the reasons of his special plea. Though he spoke with a cool voice, emphatic intonations, and at times almost judicial deliberation, he had become warmed so that her inert silence met him like a chill barrier. He felt that he had talked the 'sales-talk' of a 'go-getter' of his city, city like an enthusiastic nightmare of another planet now.

What is there in her face, he asked himself with a sudden frenzied access, what is there in her soul, that has made me return, time after time—made my nights a memory and my days a double vision? Love? It was to laugh at the simplicity of the tiny word. Who had told that love was torture of the being, that love would blast life from him in a flutter of trivialities as oak-leaves are loosed upon the wind after the first frost? Who had told him that love would eat beneath his comfort in accomplishment until he knew himself in his wanderings a lost soul? Beneath everything, his most cherished activities, lay a weary impatience with them and a sense of their irrelevance in the lack of a determining motive to channel their force.

She turned to him, and it was as though she had descried a vision of beatification in the darkness; she took his hand as though she would warm it in her cold hand. But the light in her face slowly died as her low voice, with pauses, unwonted uncertainties here and there, went on. Again, as though tranced, he had nothing but to listen, given up not to her reasonings, but to her, the spirit beneath, which embraced not only them and her conduct, but the very qualities which made her to him what she was. And it was her hand which was warmed, though a gesture lifted both to her breast.

'Richard, I know. That is what makes it so hard, that I do understand. Oh, don't think I don't want happiness, that I am harsh. But I have found the hardest thing to do.... I see father going about the farm as though he were lost; and his hair is white.... Like his horses, he is old; like them, he is patient, even in waiting for the end. What should I be doing to leave him? There is some other way. My mother seems daily to give her frail life to the white narcissi; and, while she is not old, she makes me fear the more. You can see how it is with me, and how I must not listen to—the outer world, even to—even as I have....' Her voice broke as if from a weight of longing which would return in after days.

Richard Milne's impelling desperation would no longer be kept within bounds. He seemed to find her plea unanswerable as she had his. He rose from the seat. His voice quivered. A fear that they were cutting themselves off from each other as they had done before did not suffice to temper his embittered discomfiture, which he scarcely cloaked in polite circumstantiality.

'It is late and I must not keep you, Ada. We must talk again,' he added with a perverse effort at balance. He was facing the window giving on the dark room; across it he saw the crack of light under the door, which showed that life went on in the rear portions of the house. 'I hope my intrusion hasn't kept your mother too long from her bulbs.' To this irrepressible malice in jejune and childish politeness Ada made a vague gesture and rose as he went on: 'I am going to have a talk with your parents. They, too, may not be able to understand reason and common logic, but at least they shall listen. It is late now, and I shall not disturb them.'

She put out her hand. 'I'm sorry, Richard.' She said it so simply and with such significance that his anger melted, and he half felt that he was defeated once more. Then his stubborn pugnacity whelmed the feeling. He grasped her extended hand.

'Give them my regards, please, and tell them that. We'll see.'

Smiling a little at his grimness, the tall woman murmured:

'I'm sure they'll be glad to see you again. They have so few visitors, and they remember you, of course. Father was asking why you hadn't seen him the last time you were here.'

'I look at the whole thing differently now,' he declared again. 'I must see them both regardless of any kind interest they may have in me.'

Ada Lethen became grave. 'Richard, you mustn't look at it in that way. There's nothing to get angry about, nothing to be done.' She looked at him with steadfast, upraised eyes.

'That remains to be seen, and will be seen. Good night, Ada.'

Smiling a little, she stood on the veranda and watched him quickly swallowed in the gloom of the night, his footsteps muffled by the grass and pine needles, by the wind roaring above him, wrapping him with huge tatters in the road.

He was gone.