Читать книгу In the Wilderness - Robert Hichens - Страница 5

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One winter day in 1895—it was a Sunday—when fog lay thickly over London, Rosamund Everard sat alone in a house in Great Cumberland Place, reading Dante’s “Paradiso.” Her sister, Beatrice, a pale, delicate and sensitive shadow who adored her, and her guardian, Bruce Evelin, a well-known Q.C. now retired from practice, had gone into the country to visit some friends. Rosamund had also been invited, and much wanted, for there was a party in the house, and her gaiety, her beauty, and her fine singing made her a desirable guest; but she had “got out of it.” On this particular Sunday she specially wished to be in London. At a church not far from Great Cumberland Place—St. Mary’s, Welby Street—a man was going to preach that evening whom she very much wanted to hear. Her guardian’s friend, Canon Wilton, had spoken to her about him, and had said to her once, “I should particularly like you to hear him.” And somehow the simple words had impressed themselves upon her. So, when she heard that Mr. Robertson was coming from his church in Liverpool to preach at St. Mary’s, she gave up the country visit to hear him.

Beatrice and Bruce Evelin had no scruples in leaving her alone for a couple of days. They knew that she, who had such an exceptional faculty for getting on with all sorts and conditions of men and women, and who always shed sunshine around her, had within her a great love of, sometimes almost a thirst for, solitude.

“I need to be alone now and then,” they had heard her say; “it’s like drinking water to me.”

Sitting quietly by the fire with her delightful edition of Dante, her left hand under her head, her tall figure stretched out in a low chair, Rosamund heard a bell ring below. It called her from the “Paradiso.” She sprang up, remembering that she had given the butler no orders about not wishing to be disturbed. At lunch-time the fog had been so dense that she had not thought about possible visitors; she hurried to the head of the staircase.

“Lurby! Lurby! I’m not at—”

It was too late. The butler must have been in the hall. She heard the street door open and a man’s voice murmuring something. Then the door shut and she heard steps. She retreated into the drawing-room, pulling down her brows and shaking her head. No more “Paradiso,” and she loved it so! A moment before she had been far away.

The book was lying open on the arm-chair in which she had been sitting. She went to close it and put it on a table. For an instant she looked down on the page, and immediately her dream returned. Then Lurby’s dry, soft voice said behind her:

“Mr. Leith, ma’am.”

“Oh!” She turned, leaving the book.

Directly she looked at Dion Leith she knew why he had come.

“I’m all alone,” Rosamund said. “I stayed here, instead of going to Sherrington with Beattie and my guardian, because I wanted to hear a sermon this evening. Come and sit down by the fire.”

“What church are you going to?”

“St. Mary’s, Welby Street.”

“Shall I go with you?”

Rosamund had taken up the “Paradiso” and was shutting it.

“I think I’ll go alone,” she said gently but quite firmly.

“What are you reading?”

“Dante’s ‘Paradiso.’”

She put the book down on a table at her elbow.

“I don’t believe you meant me to be let in,” he said bluntly.

“I didn’t know it was you. How could I know?”

“And if you had known?”

She hesitated. His brows contracted till he looked almost fierce.

“I’m not sure. Honestly I’m not sure. I’ve been quite alone since Friday, when they went. And I’d got it into my head that I wasn’t going to see any one till to-morrow, except, of course, at the church.”

Dion felt chilled almost to the bone.

“I can’t understand,” he almost burst out, in an uncontrolled way that surprised himself. “Are you completely self-sufficing then? But it isn’t natural. Could you live alone?”

“I didn’t say that.”

She looked at him steadily and calmly, without a hint of anger.

“But could you?”

“I don’t know. Probably not. I’ve never tried.”

“But you don’t hate the idea?”

His voice was almost violent.

“No; if—if I were living in a certain way.”

“What way?”

But she did not answer his question.

“I dare say I might dislike living alone. I’ve never done such a thing, therefore I can’t tell.”

“You’re an enigma,” he exclaimed. “And you seem so—so—you have this extraordinary, this abnormal power of attracting people to you. You are friends with everybody.”

“Indeed I’m not.”

“I mean you’re so cordial, so friendly with everybody. Don’t you care for anybody?”

“I care very much for some people.”

“And yet you could live alone! Shut in here for days with a book”—at that moment he was positively jealous of old Dante, gone to his rest five hundred and seventy-four years ago—“you’re perfectly happy.”

“The ‘Paradiso’ isn’t an ordinary book,” she said, very gently, and looking at him with a kind, almost beaming expression in her yellow-brown eyes.

“I don’t believe you ever read an ordinary book.”

“I like to feed on fine things. I’m half afraid of the second-rate.”

“I love you for that. Oh, Rosamund, I love you for so many things!”

He got up and stood by the fire, turning his back to her for a moment. When he swung round his face was earnest but he looked calmer. She saw that he was making a strong effort to hold himself in, that he was reaching out after self-control.

“I can’t tell you all the things I love you for,” he said, “but your independence of spirit frightens me. From the very first, from that evening when I saw you in the omnibus at the Milan Station over a year ago, I felt your independence.”

“Did I manifest it in the omnibus to poor Beattie and my guardian?” she asked, smiling, and in a lighter tone.

“I don’t know,” he said gravely. “But when I saw you the same evening walking with your sister in the public garden I felt it more strongly. Even the way you held your head and moved—you reminded me of the maidens of the Porch on the Acropolis. I connected you with Greece and all my—my dreams of Greece.”

“Perhaps if you hadn’t just come from Greece—”

“Wasn’t it strange,” he said, interrupting her but quite unconscious that he did so, “that almost the first words I heard you speak were about Greece? You were telling your sister abut the Greek divers who come to Portofino to find coral under the sea. I was sitting alone in the garden, and you passed and I heard just a few words. They made me think of the first Greek Island I ever saw, rising out of the sunset as I voyaged from Constantinople to the Piraeus. It was wonderfully beautiful and wonderfully calm. It was like a herald of all the beauty and purity I found in Greece. It was—like you.”

“How you hated Constantinople!” she said. “I remember you denouncing its noise and its dirt, and the mongrel horrors of Pera, to my guardian in the hotel where we made friends. And he put in a plea for Stamboul.”

“Yes, I exaggerated. But Constantinople stood to me for all the uproar of life, and Greece for the calm and beauty and happiness, the great Sanity of the true happiness.”

He looked at her with yearning in his dark eyes.

“For all I want in my own life,” he added.

He paused; then an expression of strong, almost hard resolution made his face look suddenly older.

“You told me at Burstal, on the Chilton Downs, after your debut in ‘Elijah,’ that you would give me an answer soon. I have waited a good while—some weeks——”

“Why did you ask me just that day, after ‘Woe unto them’?”

“I felt I must,” he answered, but with a slight awkwardness, as if he were evading something and felt half-guilty. “To-day I decided I would ask you again, for the last time.”

“You would never——”

“No, never. If you say ‘Wait, and come later on and ask me,’ I shall not come.”

She got up restlessly. She was obviously moved.

“Dion, I can’t tell you to-day.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. I just feel I can’t. It’s no use.”

“When did you mean to tell me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you mean ever to allude to the matter again, if I hadn’t?”

“Yes, I should have told you, because I knew you were waiting. I—I—often I have thought that I shall never marry any one.”

She looked into the fire. Her face had become almost mysterious.

“Some women don’t need—that,” she murmured.

The fire played over her pale yellow hair.

“Abnormal women!” he exclaimed violently.

She turned.

“Hush! You don’t know what you are saying. It isn’t abnormal to wish to dedicate——”

She stopped.

“What?” he said.

“Don’t let us talk of these things. But you must not judge any woman without knowing what is in her heart. Even your own mother, with whom you have lived alone ever since your father’s death—do you know very much of her? We can’t always show ourselves plainly as we are. It may not be our fault.”

“You will marry. You must marry.”

“Why—must?”

He gazed at her. As she met his eyes she reddened slightly, understanding his thought, that such a woman as she was ought not to avoid the great vocation of woman. But there was another vocation, and perhaps it was hers. She felt confused. Two desires were struggling within her. It was as if her nature contained two necessities which were wholly irreconcilable the one with the other.

“You can’t tell me?” he said, at last.

“Not now.”

“Then I am going, and I shall never ask you again. But I shall never be able to love any one but you.”

He said nothing more, and went away without touching her hand.

Words of Dante ran in Rosamund’s head, and she repeated them to herself after Dion had gone.

“La divina volontate!” She believed in it; she said to herself that she trusted it absolutely. But how was she to know exactly what it was? And yet, could she escape from it even if she wished to? Could she wander away into any path where the Divine Will did not mean her to set foot? Predestination—free will. “If only I were not so ignorant,” she thought.

Soon after six she went up to her bedroom to put on her things for church.

Her bedroom was very simple, and showed plainly an indifference to luxury, a dislike of show and of ostentation in its owner. The walls and ceiling were white. The bed, which stood against the wall in one corner, was exceptionally long. This fact, perhaps, made it look exceptionally narrow. It was quite plain, had a white wooden bedstead, and was covered with a white bedspread of a very ordinary type. There was one arm-chair in the room made of wickerwork with a rather hard cushion on the seat, the sort of cushion that resolutely refuses to “give” when one sits down on it. On the small dressing-table there was no array of glittering silver bottles, boxes and brushes. A straw flagon of eau-de-Cologne was Rosamund’s sole possession of perfume. She did not own a box of powder or a puff. But it must be acknowledged that she never looked “shiny.” She had some ivory hair-brushes given to her one Christmas by Bruce Evelin. Beside them was placed a hideous receptacle for—well, for anything—pins, perhaps, buttons, small tiresomenesses of that kind. It was made of some glistening black material, and at its center there bloomed a fearful red cabbage rose, a rose all vulgarity, ostentation and importance. This monstrosity had been given to Rosamund as a thank-offering by a poor charwoman to whom she had been kind. It had been in constant use now for over three years. The charwoman knew this with grateful pride.

Upon the mantelpiece there were other gifts of a similar kind: a photograph frame made of curly shells, a mug with “A present from Greenwich” written across it in gold letters, a flesh-colored glass vase with yellow trimmings, a china cow with its vermilion ears cocked forward, lying down in a green meadow which just held it, and a toy trombone with a cord and tassels. There were also several photographs of poor people in their Sunday clothes. On the walls hung a photograph of Cardinal Newman, a good copy of a Luini Madonna, two drawings of heads by Burne-Jones, a small painting—signed “G. F. Watts”—of an old tree trunk around which ivy was lovingly growing, and one or two prints.

The floor was polished and partially covered by three good-sized mats. There was a writing-table on one side of the room with an ebony-and-gold crucifix standing upon it. Opposite to it, on the other side of the room near the fireplace, was a bookcase. On the shelves were volumes of Shakespeare, Dante, Emerson, Wordsworth, Browning, Christina Rossetti, Newman’s “Dream of Gerontius” and “Apologia,” Thomas a Kempis, several works on mystics and mysticism, a life of St. Catherine of Genoa, another of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Ignatius Loyola’s “Spiritual Exercises,” Pascal’s “Letters,” etc., etc. Over the windows hung gray-blue curtains.

Into this room Rosamund came that evening; she went to a wardrobe and began to take down a long sealskin coat. Just then her maid appeared—an Italian girl whom she had taken into her service in Milan when she had studied singing there.

“Shan’t I come with you, Signorina?” she asked, as she took the jacket from her mistress and held it for Rosamund to put on.

“No, thank you, Maria. I’m going to church, the Protestant church.”

“I could wait outside or come back to fetch you.”

“It’s not far. I shall be all right.”

“But the fog is terrible. It’s like a wall about the house.”

“Is it as bad as that?”

She went to one of the windows, pulled aside the curtains, lifted the blind and tried to look out. But she could not, for the fog pressed against the window panes and hid the street and the houses opposite.

“It is bad.”

She dropped the blind, let the curtains fall into place and turned round.

“But I’d rather go alone. I can’t miss the way, and I’m not a nervous person. You’d be far more frightened than I.” She smiled at the girl.

Apparently reassured, or perhaps merely glad that her unselfishness was not going to be tested, Maria accompanied her mistress downstairs and let her out. It was Lurby’s “evening off,” and for once he was not discreetly on hand.

Church bells were chiming faintly in this City of dreadful night as Rosamund almost felt her way onward. She heard them and thought they were sad, and their melancholy seemed to be one with the melancholy of the atmosphere. Some one passed by her. She just heard a muffled sound of steps, just discerned a shadow—that was all.

To-morrow she must give an answer to Dion Leith. She went on slowly in the fog, thinking, thinking. Two vertical lines showed in her usually smooth forehead.

It was nearly half-past six when she turned into Welby Street. The church was not a large one and there was no parish attached to it. It was a proprietary chapel. The income of the incumbent came from pew rents. His name was Limer, and he was a first-rate preacher of the sensational type, a pulpit dealer in “actualities.” He was also an excellent musician, and took great pains with his choir. In consequence of these talents, and of his diligent application of them, St. Mary’s was generally full, and all its pews were let at a high figure. To-night, however, because of the fog, Rosamund expected to find few people.

One bell was mournfully ringing as she drew near and presently saw a faint gleaming of light through long narrow windows of painted glass. “Ping, ping, ping!” It was a thin little summons to prayer. She passed through a gateway in some railings of wrought ironwork, crossed a slippery pavement and entered the church.

It was already more than three parts full, and there was a large proportion of men in the congregation. A smart-looking young man, evidently a gentleman, who was standing close to the door, nodded to Rosamund and whispered:

“I’ll put you into Lady Millingham’s seat. You’ll find Mrs. Chetwinde and Mr. Darlington there.”

“Oh, I’d rather—” began Rosamund.

But he had already begun to move up the aisle, and she was obliged to follow him to a pew close to the pulpit, in which were seated a smartly dressed woman with a vague and yet acute expression, pale eyes and a Burne-Jones throat; and a thin, lanky and immensely tall man of uncertain age, with pale brown, very straight hair, large white ears, thick ragged eyebrows, a carefully disarranged beard and mustache, and an irregular refined face decorated with a discreet but kind expression. These were Mrs. Willie Chetwinde, who had a wonderful house in Lowndes Square, and Mr. Esme Darlington, bachelor, of St. James’s Square, who was everybody’s friend including his own.

Rosamund just recognized them gravely; then she knelt down and prayed earnestly, with her face hidden against her muff. She still heard the little bell’s insistent “Ping, ping, ping!” She pressed her shut eyes so hard against the muff that rings of yellow light floated up in her darkness, forming, retreating, melting away.

The bell ceased; the first notes of the organ sounded in a voluntary by Mendelssohn, amiable and charming; the choir filed in as Rosamund rose from her knees. In the procession the two last figures were Mr. Limer and Mr.—or, as he was always called in Liverpool, Father—Robertson.

Mr. Limer was a short, squat, clean-shaven but hairy dark man, with coal-black hair sweeping round a big forehead, a determined face and large, indignant brown eyes. The Liverpool clergyman was of middle height, very thin, with snow-white hair, dark eyes and eyebrows, and a young almost boyish face, with straight, small features, and a luminous, gentle and yet intense look. He seemed almost to glow, quietly, definitely, like a lamp set in a dark place, and one felt that his glow could not easily be extinguished. He walked tranquilly by the side of Mr. Limer, and looked absolutely unselfconscious, quietly dignified and simple.

When he went into the pulpit the lights were lowered and a pleasant twilight prevailed. But the preacher’s face was strongly illuminated.

Mr. Robertson preached on the sin of egoism, and took as the motto of his sermon the words—“Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat.” His method of preaching was quiet, but intense; again the glow of the lamp. Often there were passages which suggested a meditation—a soul communing with itself fearlessly, with an unyielding, but never violent, determination to arrive at the truth. And Rosamund, listening, felt as if nothing could keep this man with the snow-white hair and the young face away from the truth.

He ranged over a wide field—egoism being wide as the world—he exposed many of the larger evils brought about by egoism, in connexion with the Arts, with politics, with charity, with religious work in great cities, with missionary enterprises abroad; he touched on some of the more subtle forms of egoism, which may poison even the sources of love; and finally he discussed the gains and the losses of egoism. “For,” he said, “let us be honest and acknowledge that we often gain, in the worldly sense, by our sins, and sometimes lose by our virtues.” Power of a kind can be, and very often is, obtained by egoists through their egoism. He discussed that power, showed its value and the glory of it. Then he contrasted with it the power which is only obtained by those who, completely unselfish, know not how to think of themselves. He enlarged on this theme, on the Kingdom which can belong only to those who are selfless. And then he drew to the end of his sermon.

“One of the best means I know,” he said, “for getting rid of egoism is this: whenever you have to take some big decision between two courses of action—perhaps between two life courses—ask yourself, ‘Which can I share?’—which of these two paths is wide enough to admit of my treading it with a companion, whose steps I can help, whose journey I can enliven, whose weariness I can solace, and whose burden I can now and then bear for a little while? And if only one of the paths is wide enough, then choose that in preference to the other. I believe profoundly in ‘sharing terms.’”

He paused, gazing at the congregation with his soft and luminous eyes. Then he added:

“Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat. When the insistent I sleeps, only then perhaps can the heart be truly awake, be really watchful. Then let us send the insistent I to sleep, and let us keep it slumbering.”

He half-smiled as he finished. There had been something slightly whimsical about his final words, about his manner and himself when he said them.

Silence and the fog, and Rosamund walking homewards with her hands deep in her muff. All those bodies and minds and souls which had been in the church had evaporated into the night. Mrs. Chetwinde and Esme Darlington had wanted to speak to Rosamund, but she had slipped out of the church quickly. She did not wish to talk to any one.

“Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat.”

What an odd little turn, or twist, the preacher had given to the meaning of those words! “Whenever you have to take some big decision between two life courses, ask yourself, ‘Which can I share?’ and if you can only share one, choose that.”

Very slowly Rosamund walked on, bending a little above the big muff, like one pulled forward by a weight of heavy thoughts. She turned a corner. Presently she turned another corner and traversed a square, which could not be seen to be a square. And then, quite suddenly, she realized that she had not been thinking about her way home and that she was lost in the impenetrable fog.

She stood still and listened. She heard nothing. Traffic seemed stopped in this region. On her left there were three steps. She went up them and was under the porch of a house. Light shone dully from within, and by it she could just make out on the door the number “8.” At least it seemed to her that probably it was an “8.” She hesitated, came down the steps, and walked on. It was impossible to see the names of the streets and squares. But presently she would come across a policeman. She went on and on, but no policeman bulked shadowy against the background of night and of the fog which at last seemed almost terrible to her.

Rosamund was not timid. She was constitutionally incapable of timidity. Nor was she actively alarmed in a strong and definite way. But gradually there seemed to permeate her a cold, almost numbing sensation of loneliness and of desolation. For the first time in her life she felt not merely alone but solitary, and not merely solitary but as if she were condemned to be so by some power that was hostile to her.

It was a hideous feeling. Something in the fog and in the night made an assault upon her imagination. Abruptly she was numbered among the derelict women whom nobody wants, whom no man thinks of or wishes to be with, whom no child calls mother. She felt physically and morally, “I am solitary,” and it was horrible to her. She saw herself old and alone, and she shuddered.

How long she walked on she did not know, but when at last she heard a step shuffling along somewhere in front of her, she had almost—she thought—realized Eternity.

The step was not coming towards her but was going onwards slowly before her. She hastened, and presently came up with an old man, poorly dressed in a dreadful frock-coat and disgraceful trousers, wearing on his long gray locks a desperado of a top hat, and carrying, in a bloated and almost purple hand, a large empty jug.

“Please!” said Rosamund.

The old gentleman shuffled on.

“Could you tell me—please—can you tell me where we are?”

She had grasped his left coat-sleeve. He turned and, bending, she peered into the face of a drunkard.

“Close to the ‘Daniel Lambert,’” said an almost refined old voice.

And a pair of pathetic gray eyes peered up at her above a nose that was like a conflagration.

“Where’s that? What is it?”

“Don’t you know the ‘Daniel Lambert’?”

The voice sounded very surprised and almost suspicious.

“No.”

“It’s well known, very well known. I’m just popping round there to get a little something—eh!”

The voice died away.

“I want to find Great Cumberland Place.”

“Well, you’re pretty close to it. The ‘Daniel Lambert’s’ in the Edgware Road.”

“Could you find it?—Great Cumberland Place, I mean?”

“Certainly.”

“I wish you would. I should be so grateful.”

The gray eyes became more pathetic.

“Grateful to me—would you, miss? I’ll go with you and very glad to do it.”

The old gentleman took Rosamund home and talked to her on the way. When they parted she asked for his name and address. He hesitated for a moment and then gave it: “Mr. Thrush, 2 Albingdon Buildings, John’s Court, near Edgware Road.”

“Thank you. You’ve done me a good turn.”

At this moment the front door was opened by the housemaid.

“Oh—miss!” she said.

Her eyes left Rosamund and fastened themselves, like weapons, on the old gentleman’s nose. He lifted his desperado of a hat and immediately turned away, trying to conceal his jug under his left arm, but inadvertently letting it protrude.

“Good night, and thank you very much indeed!” Rosamund called after him with warm cordiality.

“I’m glad you’ve got back, miss. We were in a way. It’s ever so late.”

“I got lost in the fog. That dear old man rescued me.”

“I’m very thankful, miss, I’m sure.”

The girl seemed stiffened with astonishment. She shut the street door automatically.

“He used to be a chemist once.”

“Did he, miss?”

“Yes, quite a successful one too; just off Hanover Square, he told me. He was going round to get something for his supper when we met.”

“Indeed, miss?”

Rosamund went upstairs.

“Yes, poor old man,” she said, as she ascended.

Like most people in perfect health Rosamund slept well; but that night she lay awake. She did not want to sleep. She had something to decide, something of vital importance to her. Two courses lay open to her. She might marry Dion Leith, or she might resolve never to marry. Like most girls she had had dreams, but unlike most girls, she had often dreamed of a life in which men had no place. She had recently entered upon the career of a public singer, not because she was obliged to earn money but because she had a fine voice and a strong temperament, and longed for self-expression. But she had always believed that her public career would be a short one. She loved fine music and enjoyed bringing its message home to people, but she had little or no personal vanity, and the life of a public performer entailed a great deal which she already found herself disliking. Recently, too, her successful career had received a slight check. She had made her festival debut at Burstal in “Elijah,” and no engagements for oratorio had followed upon it. Some day, while she was still young, she meant to retire, and then——

If she married Dion Leith she would have to give up an old dream. On the other hand, if she married him, perhaps some day she would be a mother. She felt certain—she did not know why—that if she did not marry Dion Leith she would never marry at all.

She thought, she prayed, she thought again. Sometimes in the dark hours of that night the memory of her sensation of loneliness in the fog returned to her. Sometimes Mr. Robertson’s “Which can I share?” echoed within her, in the resonant chamber of her soul. He had been very quiet, but he had made an enormous impression upon her; he had made her hate egoism much more than she had hated it hitherto.

Even into the innermost sanctuary of religion egoism can perhaps find a way. The thought of that troubled Rosamund in the dark. But when the hour of dawn grew near she fell asleep. She had made up her mind, or, rather, it had surely been made up for her. For a conviction had come upon her that for good or for evil it was meant that her life should be linked with Dion Leith’s. He possessed something which she valued highly, and which, she thought, was possessed by very few men. He offered it to her. If she refused it, such an offering would probably never be made to her again.

To be a lonely woman; to be a subtle and profound egoist; to be loved, cherished, worshiped; to be a mother.

Many lives of women seemed to float before her eyes.

Just before she lost consciousness it seemed to her, for a moment, that she was looking into the pathetic eyes of the old man whom she had met in the fog.

“Poor old man!” she murmured.

She slept.

On the following morning she sent this note to Dion Leith:

“MY DEAR DION,—I will marry you.

“ROSAMUND.”