Читать книгу The Return of the Prodigal - Sinclair May - Страница 4

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The train reached Little Sutton at seven. Just as he had traveled third-class, so he had preposterously planned to send his luggage on by carrier, and plod the five miles between town and station on foot. He wanted to keep up the illusion.

The station, anyhow, was all right. They had enlarged it a bit, but it was still painted a dirty drab (perhaps there used to be a shade more yellow ochre in the drab), and the Virginian creeper still climbed over the station master's box, veiling him as in a bower. If he could have swallowed up time (fifteen years of it) as the New York and Chicago Express swallowed up space, he might have felt himself a young man again, a limp young man, slightly the worse for drink, handed down to the porter like a portmanteau by the friendly arm of a fellow-passenger, on one of those swift, sudden, and ill-timed returns that preceded his last great exodus. Only that, whereas Stephen Lepper at thirty-nine was immaculately attired, the coat of that unfortunate young man hung by a thread or two, and his trousers by a button; while, instead of five million dollars piled at his back, he had but eighteenpence (mostly copper) lying loose in his front pockets. But Stephen Lepper had grown so used to his clothes and his millions that he carried them unconsciously. They offered no violence to the illusion. What might have destroyed it was the strange, unharmonizing fact that he was sober. But he had got used to being sober, too.

The road unrolled itself for two miles over the pale green downs. It topped the spine of a little hog-backed hill and dipped toward the town (road all right). To his left, on the crest of the hill, stood the old landmark, three black elms in a field that was rased and bleached after the hay-harvest. They leaned toward each other, and between their trunks the thick blue-gray sky showed solid as paint (landmark all right).

In the queer deep light that was not quite twilight things were immobile and distinct, as if emphasizing their outlines before losing them. The illusion was acute, almost intolerable.

Down there lay the town, literally buried in the wooded combe. Slabs of gray wall and purple roof, sunk in the black-green like graves in grass. A white house here and there faced him with the stare of monumental marble. In the middle a church with a stunted spire squatted like a mortuary chapel. They had run up a gaudy red-brick villa or two outside, but on the whole Little Sutton was all right, too. He had always thought it very like a cemetery—a place where people lay buried till the Day of Judgment.

The man he had been was really dead and buried down there. It was as if a glorified Stephen Lepper stood up and contemplated his last resting-place. The clothes he wore were so many signs and symbols of his joyful resurrection. If any doubted, he could point to them in proof. Not that he anticipated this necessity. To be sure, his people had once regarded the possibility of a resurrection as, to say the least of it, antecedently improbable. They had even refused to accept his authentic letters, written on the actual paper of a temperance hotel, as sufficient proof of it. He had not altogether blamed them for their Sadducean attitude, being a little skeptical himself.

Nevertheless, the resurrection was an accomplished fact. There had been a woman in it. She was to have been his wife if she had lived. But she had not lived, and her death was the one episode as to which he had been reticent. She was the sort of woman that drives men to drink by marrying them; for she had a face like an angel and a tongue like a two-edged sword, sheathed in time of courtship. The miracle had happened so long ago that it had passed into the region of things unregarded because admitting of no doubt. He had never been what you might call a confirmed drunkard—he hadn't been steady enough for that—and fifteen years of incontrovertible sobriety had effaced the fitful record of his orgies. So it never occurred to him now that his character could be regarded otherwise than with the confidence accorded to such solid and old-established structures as the Church or Bank. He dreaded no shrinking in the eyes of the three women he had come to see. But supposing—merely supposing—anything so unlikely as a mental reservation or suspension of judgment on their part, there was that solid pile of dollars at his back for proof. And because the better part of five million dollars cannot be produced visibly and bodily at a moment's notice, and because the female mind has difficulty in grasping so abstract an idea as capital, he had brought with him one or two little presents—tangible intimations, as it were, of its existence.

He had had two hours to spare at Liverpool before his train left Lime Street. They had flown in the rapture of his shopping. To follow his progress through Castle Street and Bond Street, the casual observer would have deemed him possessed by a blind and maniac lust of miscellaneous spending. But there had been method in that madness, a method simple and direct. He had stalked first of all into a great silk-mercer's and demanded a silk suitable for an old lady, a satin suitable for a young lady, another satin for a lady—not so young. Then, suddenly remembering that his mother used to yearn even in widowhood for plum color, while Minnie (who was pretty and had red hair) fancied a moss-green, and Kate (who was not pretty) a rose-pink, he neither paused nor rested till he had obtained these tints. Lace, too—his mother had had a perfect passion for lace, unsatisfied because of its ideal nature—a lace of her dreams. He had decided on one or two fine specimens of old point. He supposed this would be the nearest approach to the ideal, being the most expensive. Then he had to get a few diamond pins, butterflies, true-love knots, and so on, to fix it with. And, while he was about it, a diamond necklace, and a few little trifles of that sort for Minnie and Kate. Then their figures (dimly dowdy) had come back to him across the years, one plain, the other pretty but peculiar. He accounted for that by remembering that Kate had been literary, while Minnie was musical.

So he had just turned in at a bookseller's and stated that he wanted some books—say about twenty or thirty pounds' worth. The man of books had gauged his literary capacity in a glance, and suggested that he had better purchase the Hundred Best Books. "Well," he had said (rather sharply, for time was getting on), "I reckon I don't want any but the best." In the same spirit he had approached the gentleman in the piano-forte emporium and ordered a Steinway Grand to be forwarded when he knew his permanent address. For as yet it was uncertain which county contained it, that princely residence—the old manor-house or baronial hall—in which henceforth they would live together in affluence. He didn't exactly see them there, those three queer, dowdy little women. God forgive him, it was his fault if they went shabby. He remembered how they used to stint themselves, eating coarse food and keeping no servant, so that Kate had never any time for her books nor Minnie for her music. He would change all that now.

As he walked on he dreamed a dream.

In the foreground of his dream (rich parqueterie) three figures went to and fro, one adorable in plum color and point lace; one, the one with the red hair, still beautiful in green; and one, not beautiful, but—well—elegant in pink. Now he saw a dining-room sumptuously furnished, a table white with silver and fine linen, and the same figures sitting at it, drinking champagne and eating the fool messes that women love to eat, queer things cooked in cream, and ice-puddings, and so on. And now it was a lofty music room, and Minnie taking the roof off with one of her So-nahters on the Steinway Grand; and now a library (the Hundred Best Books had grown into a library), and Kate, studious, virgin, inviolate in leisure. Then slap through it all went the little mother driving in her own carriage, a victoria for fine weather, a brougham for wet. (It was before the days of motor-cars.) Somewhere on the outskirts of his dream (moorland for choice) there hovered a gentleman in shooting clothes, carrying a gun, or on the uttermost dim verge, the sky-line of it, the same vague form (equestrian) shot gloriously by. But he took very little interest in him.

Ah, there were the cross-roads and the Bald-faced Stag at the corner. Not a scrap changed since the last time he visited it—day when he rode the Major's roan mare slap through the saloon bar into the bowling-alley. Did it for a bet, and won it, too, and bought his mother a stuffed badger in a glass case with the money, as a propitiatory offering. Only another mile.

His road ran into the lighted High Street, through a black avenue of elms as through a tunnel. Reality assailed him with a thousand smells. No need to ask his way to the North End.

He turned off through an alley into a dark lane, bordered with limes. The thick, sweet scent dropped from the trees, a scent dewy with the childhood of the night. It felt palpable as a touch. It was as if he felt his mother's fingers on his face, and the kisses of his innocent girl-sisters.

He went slowly up the lane toward a low light at the end of it. At the corner, where it turned, was a small house black with ivy and fenced with a row of espalier limes. The light he made for came from the farthest window of the ground floor. Through a gap in the lime fence he could see into the room.

The house was sunk a little below the level of the lane, so that he seemed to be looking straight down into a pit of yellow light hollowed out of the blackness. Two figures sat knitting at the window on the edge of the pit. His mother and Kate. A third, in the center of the light, leaned her elbows on the table and propped her head on her hands. He knew her for Minnie by her red hair. Beyond them a side window was open to the night.

There were two ways by which he could approach them. He could go boldly in at the iron gate and up the flagged path to the front door. Or he could go round to the side, up the turning of the lane, where the garden wall rose high, into the back garden. Thence, through a thick yew arch into a narrow path between the end of the house and the high wall. By the one way they would be certain to see him through the front window. By the other he would see them (through the side window) without being seen. Owing to a certain moisture and redness about his eyes and nose he was not yet quite ready to be seen. Therefore he chose the side way. Sitting on a garden seat in the embrasure of the arch, he commanded a slanting but uninterrupted view of the room and its inmates.

There, in the quiet, he could hear the clicking needles of the knitters, and the breathing of the red-haired woman. And he longed with a great longing for the sound of their voices. If one of them would only speak!