Читать книгу The Helpmate - Sinclair May - Страница 6

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It was impossible for them to stay any longer at Scarby. The place was haunted by the presence and the voice of scandalous rumour. Anne had the horrible idea that it had been also a haunt of Lady Cayley, of the infamy itself.

The week-old honeymoon looked at them out of its clouds with such an aged, sinister, and disastrous aspect that they resolved to get away from it. For the sake of appearances, they spent another week of aimless wandering on the East coast, before returning to the town where an unintelligible fate had decided that Majendie should have a business he detested, and a house.

Anne had once asked herself what she would do if she were told that she would have to spend all her life in Scale on Humber. Scale is prevailingly, conspicuously commercial. It is not beautiful. Its streets are squalidly flat, its houses meanly rectangular. The colouring of Scale is thought by some to be peculiarly abominable. It is built in brown, paved and pillared in unclean grey. Its rivers and dykes run brown under a grey northeastern sky.

Once a year it yields reluctantly to strange passion, and Spring is born in Scale; born in tortures almost human, a relentless immortality struggling with visible corruption. The wonder is that it should be born at all.

To-day, the day of their return, the March wind had swept the streets clean, and the evening had secret gold and sharp silver in its grey. Anne remembered how, only last year, she had looked upon such a spring on the day when she guessed for the first time that Walter cared for her. She was not highly endowed with imagination; still, even she had felt dimly, and for once in her life, that sense of mortal tenderness and divine uplifting which is the message of Spring to all lovers.

But that emotion, which had had its momentary intensity for Anne Fletcher, was over and done with for Anne Majendie. Like some mourner for whom superb weather has been provided on the funeral day of his beloved, she felt in this young, wantoning, unsympathetic Spring the immortal cruelty and irony of Nature. She was bearing her own heart to its burial; and each street that they passed, as the slow cab rattled heavily on its way from the station, was a stage in the intolerable progress; it brought her a little nearer to the grave.

From her companion's respectful silence she gathered that, though lost to the extreme funereal significance of their journey, he was not indifferent; he shared to some extent her mourning mood. She was grateful for that silence of his, because it justified her own.

They were both, by their temperaments, absurdly and diversely, almost incompatibly young. At two-and-thirty Majendie, through very worldliness, was a boy in his infinite capacity for recoil from trouble. Anne had preserved that crude and cloistral youth which belongs to all lives passed between walls that protect them from the world. At seven-and-twenty she was a girl, with a girl's indestructible innocence. She had not yet felt within her the springs of her own womanhood. Marriage had not touched the spirit, which had kept itself apart even from her happiness, in the days that were given her to be happy in. Her suffering was like a child's, and her attitude to it bitterly immature. It bounded her; it annihilated the intellectual form of time, obliterating the past, and intercepting any view of a future. Only, unlike a child, and unlike Majendie, she lacked the power of the rebound to joy.

"Dear," said her husband anxiously, as the cab drew up at the door of the house in Prior Street, "have you realised that poor Edith is probably preparing to receive us with glee? Do you think you could manage to look a little less unhappy?"

The words were a shock to her, but they did her the service of a shock by recalling her to the realities outside herself. All the courtesies and kindnesses she owed to those about her insisted that her bridal home-coming must lack no sign of grace. She forced a smile.

"I'm sorry. I didn't know I was looking particularly unhappy."

It struck her that Walter was not looking by any means too happy himself.

"It doesn't matter; only, we don't want to dash her down, first thing, do we?"

"No—no. Dear Edith. And there's Nanna—how sweet of her—and Kate, and Mary, too."

The old nurse stood on the doorstep to welcome them; her fellow-servants were behind her, smiling, at the door. Interested faces appeared at the windows of the house opposite. At the moment of alighting Anne was aware that the eyes of many people were upon them, and she was thankful that she had married a man whose self-possession, at any rate, she could rely on. Majendie's manner was perfect. He avoided both the bridegroom's offensive assiduity and his no less offensive affectation of indifference. It had occurred to him that, in the circumstances, Anne might find it peculiarly disagreeable to be stared at.

"Look at Nanna," he whispered, to distract her attention. "There's no doubt about her being glad to see you."

Nanna grasped the hands held out to her, hanging her head on one side, and smiling her tremorous, bashful smile. The other two, Kate and Mary, came forward, affectionate, but more self-contained. Anne realised with a curious surprise that she was coming back to a household that she knew, that knew her and loved her. In the last week she had forgotten Prior Street.

Majendie watched her anxiously. But she, too, had qualities which could be relied on. As she passed into the house she had held her head high, with an air of flinging back the tragic gloom like a veil from her face. She was not a woman to trail a tragedy up and down the staircase. Above all, he could trust her trained loyalty to convention.

The servants threw open two doors on the ground floor, and stood back expectant. On such an occasion it was proper to look pleased and to give praise. Anne was fine in her observance of each propriety as she looked into the rooms prepared for her. The house in Prior Street had not lost its simple old-world look in beautifying itself for the bride. It had put on new blinds and clean paint, and the smell of spring flowers was everywhere. The rest was familiar. She had told Majendie that she liked the old things best. They appealed to her sense of the fit and the refined; they were signs of good taste and good breeding in her husband's family and in himself. The house was a survival, a protest against the terrible all-invading soul of Scale on Humber.

For another reason, which she could not yet analyse, Anne was glad that nothing had been changed for her coming. It was as if she felt that it would have been hard on Majendie if he had been put to much expense in renovating his house for a woman in whom the spirit of the bride had perished. The house in Prior Street was only a place for her body to dwell in, for her soul to hide in, only walls around walls, the shell of the shell.

She turned to her husband with a smile that flashed defiance to the invading pathos of her state. Majendie's eyes brightened with hope, beholding her admirable behaviour. He had always thoroughly approved of Anne.

Upstairs, in the room that was her own, poor Edith (the cause, as he felt, of their calamity) had indeed prepared for them with joy.

Majendie's sister lay on her couch by the window, as they had left her, as they would always find her, not like a woman with a hopelessly injured spine, but like a lady of the happy world, resting in luxury, a little while, from the assault of her own brilliant and fatiguing vitality. The flat, dark masses of her hair, laid on the dull red of her cushions, gave to her face an abrupt and lustrous whiteness, whiteness that threw into vivid relief the features of expression, the fine, full mouth, with its temperate sweetness, and the tender eyes, dark as the brows that arched them. Edith, in her motionless beauty, propped on her cushions, had acquired a dominant yet passionless presence, as of some regal woman of the earth surrendered to a heavenly empire. You could see that, however sanctified by suffering, Edith had still a placid mundane pleasure in her white wrapper of woollen gauze, and in her long lace scarf. She wore them with an appearance of being dressed appropriately for a superb occasion.

The sign of her delicacy was in her hands, smoothed and wasted with inactivity. Yet they had an energy of their own. The hands and the weak, slender arms had a surprising way of leaping up to draw to her all beloved persons who bent above her couch. They leapt now to her brother and his wife, and sank, fatigued with their effort. Two frail, nervous hands embraced Majendie's, till one of them let go, as she remembered Anne, and held her, too.

Anne had been vexed, and Majendie angry with her; but anger and vexation could not live in sight of the pure, tremulous, eager soul of love that looked at them out of Edith's eyes.

"What a skimpy honeymoon you've had," she said. "Why did you go and cut it short like that? Was it just because of me?"

In one sense it was because of her. Anne was helpless before her question; but Majendie rose to it.

"I say—the conceit of her! No, it wasn't just because of you. Anne agreed with me about Scarby. And we're not cutting our honeymoon short, we're spinning it out. We're going to have another one, some day, in a nicer place."

"Anne didn't like Scarby, after all?"

"No, I knew she wouldn't. And she lived to own that I was right."

"That," said Edith, laughing, "was a bad beginning. If I'd been you, Anne, whether I was right or not, I'd never have owned that he was."

"Anne," said Majendie, "is never anything but just. And this time she was generous."

Edith's hand was on the sleeve of Majendie's coat, caressing it. She looked up at Anne.

"And what," said she, "do you think of my little brother, on the whole?"

"I think he says a great many things he doesn't mean."

"Oh, you've found that out, have you? What else have you discovered?"

The gay question made Anne's eyelids drop like curtains on her tragedy.

"That he means a great many things he doesn't say? Is that it?"

Majendie, becoming restive under the flicker of Edith's cheerful tongue, withdrew the arm she cherished. Edith felt the nervousness of the movement; her glance turned from her brother's face to Anne's, rested there for a tense moment, and then veiled itself.

At that moment they both knew that Edith had abandoned her glad assumption of their happiness. The blessings of them all were upon Nanna as she came in with the tea-tray.

Nanna was sly and shy and ceremonial in her bearing, but under it there lurked the privileged audacity of the old servant, and (as poor Majendie perceived) the secret, terrifying gaiety of the hymeneal devotee. The faint sound of giggling on the staircase penetrated to the room. It was evident that Nanna was preparing some horrid and tremendous rite.

She set her tray in its place by Edith's couch, and cleared a side table which she had drawn into a central and conspicuous position. The three, as if humouring a child in its play, feigned a profound ignorance of what Nanna had in hand.

She disappeared, suppressed the giggling on the stairs, and returned, herself in jubilee let loose. She carried an enormous plate, and on the plate Anne's wedding-cake with all its white terraces and towers, and (a little shattered) the sugar orange blossoms and myrtles of its crown. She stood it alone on its table of honour, and withdrew abruptly.

The three were stricken dumb by the presence of the bridal thing. Nanna, listening outside the door, attributed their silence to an appreciation too profound for utterance.

They looked at it, and it looked at them. Its veil of myrtle, trembling yet with the shock of its entrance, gave it the semblance of movement and of life. It towered in the majesty of its insistent whiteness. It trailed its mystic modesties before them. Its brittle blossoms quivered like innocence appalled. The wide cleft at its base betrayed the black and formidable heart beneath the fair and sugared surface. These crowding symbols, perceptible to Edith's subtler intelligence, massed themselves in her companions' minds as one vast sensation of discomfort.

As usual when he was embarrassed, Majendie laughed.

"It's the very spirit of dyspepsia," he said. "A cold and dangerous thing. Must we eat it?"

"You must," said Edith; "Nanna would weep if you didn't."

"I don't think I can—possibly," said Anne, who was already reaping her sowing to the winds of emotion in a whirlwind of headache.

"Let's all eat it—and die," said Majendie. He hacked, laid a ruin of fragments round the evil thing, scattered crumbs on all their plates, and buried his own piece in a flower-pot. "Do you think," he said, "that Nanna will dig it up again?"

Anne turned white over her tea, pleaded her headache, and begged to be taken to her room. Majendie took her there.

"Isn't Anne well?" asked Edith anxiously, when he came back.

"Oh, it's nothing. She's been seedy all day, and the sight of that cake finished her off. I don't wonder. It's enough to upset a strong man. Let's ring for Nanna to take it away."

He rang. When Nanna appeared Edith was eating her crumbs ostentatiously, as if unwilling to leave the last of a delicious thing.

"Oh, Nanna," said she, "that's a heavenly wedding-cake!"

Majendie was reminded of the habitual tender perfidy of that saint, his sister. She was always lying to make other people happy, saying that she had everything she wanted, when she hadn't, and that her spine didn't hurt her, when it did. When Edith was too exhausted to lie, she would look at you and smile, with the sweat of her torture on her forehead. He knew Edith, and wondered how far she had lied to Anne, and what she had done it for. He had a good mind to ask her; but he shrank from "dashing her down the first day."

But Edith herself dashed everything down the first five minutes. There was nothing that she shrank from.

"I'm sorry for poor Anne," said she; "but it's nice to get you all to myself again. Just for once. Only for once. I'm not jealous."

He smiled, and stroked her hair.

"I was jealous—oh, furiously jealous, just at first, for five minutes. But I got over it. It was so undignified."

"It didn't show, dear."

"I didn't mean it to. It wouldn't have been pretty. And now, it's all over and I like Anne. But I don't like her as much as you."

"You must like her more," he said gravely. "She'll need it—badly."

Edith looked at him. "How can she need it badly, when she has you?"

"You're a good woman, and I'm a mere mortal man. She's found that out already, and she doesn't like it."

"Wallie, dear, what do you mean?"

"I mean exactly what I say. She's found it out. She's found me out. She's found everything out."

"Found out? But how?"

"It doesn't matter how. Edie, why didn't you tell her? You said you would."

"Yes—I said I would."

"And you told me you had."

"No. I didn't tell you I had."

"What did you tell me, then?"

"I told you there was nothing to be afraid of, that it was all right."

"And of course I thought you'd told her."

"If I had told her it wouldn't have been all right; for she wouldn't have married you."

Majendie scowled, and Edith went on calmly.

"I knew that—she as good as told me so—and I knew her."

"Well—what if she hadn't married me?"

"That would have been very bad for both of you. Especially for you."

"For me? And how do you know this isn't going to be worse? For both of us. It's generally better to be straight, and face facts, however disagreeable. Especially when everybody knows that you've got a skeleton in your cupboard."

"Anne didn't, and she was so afraid of skeletons."

"All the more reason why you should have hauled the horrid thing out and let her have a good look at it. She mightn't have been afraid of it then. Now she's convinced it's a fifty times worse skeleton than it is."

"She wouldn't have lived with it in the house, dear. She said so."

"But I thought you never told her?"

"She was talking about somebody else's skeleton, dear."

"Oh, somebody else's, that's a very different thing."

"She meant—if she'd been the woman. I was testing her, to see how she'd take it. Do you think I was very wrong?"

"Well, frankly, dear, I cannot say you were very wise."

"I wonder——"

She lay back wondering. Doubt of her wisdom shook her through all her tender being. She had been so sure.

"How would you have liked it," said she, "if Anne had given you up and gone away, and you'd never seen her again?"

His face said plainly that he wouldn't have liked it at all.

"Well, that's what she'd have done. And I wanted her to stay and marry you."

"Yes, but with her eyes open."

She shook her head, the head that would have been so wise for him.

"No," said she. "Anne's one of those people who see best with their eyes shut."

"Well, they're open enough now in all conscience. But there's one thing she hasn't found out. She doesn't know how it happened. Can you tell her? I can't. I told her there were extenuating circumstances; but of course I couldn't go into them."

"What did she say?"

"She said no circumstances could extenuate facts."

"I can hear her saying it."

"I understand her state of mind," said Majendie. "She couldn't see the circumstances for the facts."

"Our Anne is but young. In ten years' time she won't be able to see the facts for the circumstances."

"Well—will you tell her?"

"Of course I will."

"Make her see that I'm not necessarily an utter brute just because I——"

"I'll make her see everything."

"Forgive me for bothering you."

"Dear—forgive me for breaking my promise and deceiving you."

He bent to her weak arms.

"I believe," she whispered, "the end will yet justify the means."

"Oh—the end."

He didn't see it; but he was convinced that there could hardly be a worse beginning.

He went upstairs, where Anne lay in the agonies of her bilious attack. He found comfort, rather than gave it, by holding handkerchiefs steeped in eau-de-Cologne to her forehead. It gratified him to find that she would let him do it without shrinking from his touch.

But Anne was past that.