Читать книгу Wintersmoon - Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole - Страница 14

Table of Contents

Wildherne could remember a day when, in the gardens of Wintersmoon, aged some six years or seven, he had waded into one of the ponds to look at a water-lily. The point had been that he had wanted to look at it, not to pluck it, and the point had further been that, pulled out of the pond by one of the gardeners, he had been sent to bed in disgrace and without his supper.

He had been in no way indignant with his sentence—he knew that it was wrong for him to spoil his clothes with mud and disobey those in authority—but for the first time there had stolen into his mind wonder as to why the things that he wanted were always out of his reach. Then, as he grew older, there followed the further wonder as to why he wanted things that nobody else wanted.

At his private school at Rottingdean he learnt the first thing that little boys must be—to be like other little boys. He discovered that he was not like other little boys, and that he must hide this discovery, so he developed two Wildhernes, one that cared for football, sardines, and doughnuts in bed at night, and "scraps" with other boys, and the other that never knew what it cared for, had strange feelings about flowers, the sea, and English history, and a passionate devotion for everything that concerned Wintersmoon.

This second personality, he discovered, must be seen only by his father and one of the under-gardeners. The rest of the world laughed did he show any enthusiasm for anything that had not to do with games. At school above all he must appear to detest work of any kind. He liked work, but could not apply himself to it because thoughts about Wintersmoon and the spire of Salisbury Cathedral and the way the sea rolled in and strangled the pebbles on the long beach below the school would keep breaking in. Meanwhile he loved the under-gardener, who was called Mitchell and showed him how flowers grew, told him the names of birds, and was dismissed, in Wildherne's first year at Eton, for drunkenness.

At Eton he found that he could do what he liked, that nobody cared. Nevertheless the two Wildhernes continued to develop: he discovered that the one Wildherne was very useful for covering the other. He was good-looking, athletic, and amiable; it was not difficult for him to be popular, and he learnt that if he never showed enthusiasm about anything, never talked about anything that was "odd"—books, pictures, music, religion, scenery were things never to mention—he was popular and universally accepted as a "good fellow." When he was about sixteen he discovered that there were certain other boys in the school who cared for the things for which he himself cared. They made a set of their own, but they were all of them "odd," and some of them scandalous: he did not therefore join them, because his shyness about the things for which he cared caused him to detest publicity of any kind.

It was about this time that his love for his father acutely developed. He liked his mother, but it was his public personality with which she was concerned. She did not seem to be aware that he had any other. His father was as shy as himself, and their true communication with one another might have been long delayed had it not been for a serious attack of pneumonia that kept him prisoner during a whole summer at Wintersmoon when he was seventeen.

One summer evening, when he was convalescent, lying in a chair looking out over the lawns, the woods, the gently rising hills, he poured out all that was in his soul to his father, and from that moment they were companions.

He had always intensely admired his father, but until now he had never thought of him as human in the way that he himself was human. He was omnipotent, omniscient, something of other bodily make from himself. This evening it was as though his father's body stepped into view for the first time, blood and muscles like his own, the eyes real eyes, the chest with its breadth and thickness a man's chest, thighs and sinews of a man like himself—and when that night his father's hand closed on his he could feel the pulse beating through the strength of the palm. He twisted his fingers between his father's fingers. He kissed his father on the mouth. He had never kissed his father before, only been kissed by him.

Now he was alive to many things in his father's character that he had never seen before. He had always perceived his courtesy to others, his gentleness and yet his authority with the servants in the house and the men on the estate, but now he realised that this courtesy came from a deep modesty that would have been shyness had there been in the character more egotism.

He perceived another thing. On Sunday mornings they sat—his father, his mother, Aunt Alice, any guests—in the deep family pew in the old sixteenth-century church just outside the Wintersmoon gates. That had become a ritual so common as to inhibit consciousness. His second personality on these mornings would gladly swing itself free and he would be away far over England, far over Europe, lost in a beauty and a wonder that he had never had self-discipline enough to analyse.

But on this morning he was watching this new father of his. It was his first morning in church for months, the first bold step of his convalescence. Old Beatty, the white-bearded rector, was reading the First Lesson, and it was a Cursing Lesson—"I, the Lord thy God"—and the wretched Jews were cowering down on to their desert sand while the plague devastated them, fiery serpents assaulted them....

On his father's face was written disgust, and at the "Here endeth" he moved his thick stocky shoulders as though he would shake some evil spell from off them.

Packed off to bed early Wildherne lay there wondering. He heard his father pass his door and called to him. He urged him to the bed, made him sit down on it, put his arms around him drawing him towards him.

"Father, you hate Jehovah. So do I. I loathe him, dirty bully." He was conscious that he was whispering this, and he knew that he was whispering lest his mother should hear. They were drawn then into an intimacy closer than any they had yet encountered.

Wildherne's mother had always dominated Wildherne's world, and in nothing more completely than in religion. His outer self had acquiesced utterly. When anyone was as certain as his mother was in these things, so sure about every detail so that no place in heaven was too distant for her vision, how could anyone as uncertain and wondering as Wildherne question?

But now, behold, his father questioned. His father had also his own private life sacred to him, reserved from all the world and from his wife. He let his son in. Loyal to her they were, both of them, but here they escaped her and they knew it.

Wildherne was only seventeen and, weakened by his long illness, looked the small child that, in many ways, he still was. His father held him tight to his heart that night. Who could know for how many years he had been longing with passionate desire for this?

"Remember your mother is the best woman I have ever known or am likely to know. Without her I should be nothing. I love her, Wildherne, as I hope one day you will love some fine woman—but at the end of it, in spite of the most perfect intimacy, we are alone—always, every one of us. It is the condition of life."

Wildherne went up to Balliol; his uncle died, and his father became Duke. He did all the things that his companions did. He was considered "a jolly good fellow. Not stuck up at all. A bit absent-minded." He rowed in his College boat, took a second in Greats. He came down having many acquaintances and not one friend. For his exterior self, which he gave readily to anyone, he cared so little that friendship could not possibly go with it. His interior self he gave only to his father.

In 1914 there was the war. He was wounded in 1916, and again in the spring of 1918—tiresome wounds involving pain of the wearying, irritating kind that seems to teach you nothing but exasperation. He used to think about himself during his long hours in hospital, and it surprised him to perceive that if it had not been for his love for England he would have been, long ago, a conscientious objector. He loathed war, but he loathed the thought of a foreign-ridden England still more deeply. There was, he supposed, an intellectual flaw in this somewhere. Had he been of the intellectual calibre of, say, Bertrand Russell, he would have perceived that this love of country was exactly the thing that held back the world's progress—this selfish clinging to one small fragment of earth. But he could not help it. When he thought of Boyton Church or Figheldean Village, or the stretch of the Plain, or the old stones of St. Anne's Gate in Salisbury, or the grey stretches of Longleat, or the lawns of his own adored Wintersmoon, he simply knew that he would fight to the last trouser-button to prevent this domination by German, Frenchman, or Spaniard.

He wished those Frenchmen and Spaniards all the luck in the world, and he would gladly join with them to help them keep their own pastures free, but Figheldean was like his mother or old Aunt Alice—it looked to him with the love born of centuries of association to keep it free from harm.

So he came out of the war with this dominating him above all else—his love of England in general and of Wintersmoon in particular.

He discovered then that this same love of his country was held by almost everyone to be old-fashioned and tyrannous. His trouble was that two camps now were formed and he did not seem to belong to either of them. The advanced camp was international, Socialistic (but not Bolshevistic), anti-Christian, anti-marriage, and anti-sentimental. The reactionary camp was named Die-hard and cursed by everybody. Certain old gentlemen with whom he talked at the Club belonged apparently to this camp and were caught in a perfect mist of despair. The world was at an end, delivered over to robbers, degenerates, and sadists. He was, he found, neither socialistic nor reactionary.

He had no wish to go back to the old times when servants slept in cubby-holes, when children were abused and terrified with prospects of a fiery hell, when sanitation was in its infancy, and science was considered blasphemous. But neither did he wish to deliver Wintersmoon up to the first ignorant band of labourers who came to demand it. Nor did he believe that the traditions and heritage of England were so much discarded offal. He was alone, as always. He seemed to fit in nowhere at all.

He had always read a good deal but in a desultory fashion, picking up what came his way. Now his love for England directed all his reading energy—Chaucer and Spenser, Shakespeare of course, Marlowe, and Beaumont and Fletcher, The Spectator, and Swift and Sterne, Fielding and Richardson, Jane Austen, and then all the Victorians, Macaulay, Carlyle, Froude, Peacock, Landor, Wuthering Heights and Henry Kingsley, Hardy and Meredith, and so to the moderns. And the poets—Wordsworth first and best, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, Swinburne and Browning, Tennyson and Rossetti—all of them for the things about England that they could give him. But his great discovery was the accidental finding in the library at Wintersmoon a volume of John Clare. At that time in 1919 Clare was a forgotten poet. In the following years, thanks to the generous enthusiasms of Edmund Blunden, he was rediscovered and beautifully reissued, but to Wildherne that chance finding of a third edition of the Poems descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery seemed a miracle. He devoured the book, discovered then that no one had ever heard of Clare, and further that no one ever found the poems anything but trivial and commonplace. Even his father failed him here.

No matter. He would keep that to himself, as it seemed to him he must keep almost everything that was of importance. Hunting discovered for him the two volumes of The Village Minstrel, and this was of especial value to him because the first volume contained a steel engraving of Hilton's painting of Clare. That strange, beautiful, pathetic face became now part of Wildherne's life. It seemed to him that he had somewhere known him and been his friend. He knew nothing as yet about his history, but he saw the tragedy in those eager gazing eyes and that gentle mouth. To that man at least he could have bared his soul.

He led now his public social life in London, and there was no one to whom he could speak about his reading. When he encountered, as he did at times, men who cared for the Arts, they seemed to him to be so wise and to know so much that his modesty held him back. He felt, too, that there was something about his social position which led them to disbelieve that he could be interested in the Arts.

Some of his Oxford acquaintances moved among writers and painters, but these seemed to care for things that he did not understand. He was not modern at all. When your favourite poets are Wordsworth, Arnold, and Clare, your novelists Fielding and Sterne, your artists Cotman and Bonington and Girtin, what place had you in this other world of eccentricity and revolt? The modern arts, when he touched them at all, seemed to him all negation. His incomprehension seemed to him his own stupidity. He felt himself slow, behind the times.

Meanwhile neither the social world nor the religious world of Halkin Street realised that he cared at all for these things. His good looks, the courtesy that he inherited from his father, a certain gentleness that was never effeminacy, retained for him in London the reputation that he had had at Oxford: "Poole's a good sort. A bit absent-minded, hard to know exactly, but one of the best really."

Then, early in 1920, came his meeting with Diana Guard.

Before this women had meant little to him. His love for his father had been the only emotional experience roused by another human being that he had known.

He fell in love with Diana Guard at sight. She was not a beautiful woman. She was so fair as to be almost without colour; she was not graceful, nor did she dress with any special care. She gave, in general, the impression that she was indifferent entirely to what anyone thought of her, and that impression was the true one. She did not care.

She had married Charlie Guard when she was eighteen, and he had been unfaithful to her within a month of the wedding ceremony. They were quite good friends, and stayed together for a week or two when they had nothing better to do. Her father, old Prentiss Merriman, had left her plenty of money; Charlie always borrowed from her when he was in need. She had a beautiful flat in Charles Street, and a little house near Reading.

She was in love with Wildherne for about six months, and after that liked him very much.

He was swept by a storm of passion that blinded and deafened him to the outside world save in this, his desperate fear lest his father and mother should know of his intrigue.

Miraculously they did not. They lived, both of them, quite outside the gossiping world of modern London, and Wildherne was too well liked for anyone to think it worth his or her while to carry tales. All London knew. He was by no means Diana's first lover, nor would he be the last. Wildherne did not blind himself to this, nor did Diana attempt to hide anything, but when the six months were over and she loved him no longer, and told him so, he suffered tortures only possible for the constant lover. She wished that he would not be so constant. She was often bored with him. And yet she liked him. She often wished that she did not.

He was on his way now to tell her about Janet.

He feared, most deeply, this interview. He feared it because he knew even now as he drove to Charles Street that with every step nearer to Diana Janet's image was fading. As he went up in the lift Janet vanished. There was left only a promise, a message, a given word. And yet Diana's sitting-room was as colourless as it always was. The wallpaper was of a stiff dull bronze. There was only one picture, a Walter Sickert oil of one of his Montmartre music-halls, smoky grey with a spread of dingy red, out of which twisted faces supported by crooked arms emerged. The only other ornament was a dark Epstein bronze of a woman whose eyes were full of longing, hatred, and chagrin. There was a piano; there was a long bookcase crammed untidily with foreign books in paper covers. In a chair covered with a dark green tapestry Diana was sitting. Her faint hair, pale face, and dress of dark red-gold were as still and quiet as a pool in an autumn wood. The eyes of the Epstein woman were the only things in the room that had movement.

Wildherne came and sat down opposite her. No, he didn't want tea. He smoked a cigarette. He didn't look at her. As always when he was near her his heart hammered as though it would beat him down on to his knees before her. He could never be with her without instant memory of all the details of the intimacies of the six months that they had had together, as a drowning man is supposed to see his past life. Each separate detail flicked him with its sense of some loveliness lost for ever.

"Well, Wildherne—you've come to tell me about your engagement." She spoke very kindly; she liked him so much, and especially now that he was to belong to some other woman.

"Yes, I have."

"Very right and proper. I've met her, of course, but always with her sister, who is so pretty that she blinds one to anyone else."

How like Diana! At once to make Janet obscure and faded.

"Now tell me all about it, what you said to her, what she said to you, whether everyone is pleased (which, of course, everyone is), that you're happy, that she's happy—everything."

"There isn't very much to tell," he answered. "When I proposed to her I said that I didn't love her, that I couldn't love her because I loved you."

At that Diana made a slight movement. "Oh, Wildherne, how like you! But why did you? Did you have to do that?"

"It seemed to me that I had. I couldn't marry her without telling her. Of course she had heard about us already, but that made no difference. I had to tell her everything." He paused.

"And it made no difference? She accepted you at once?"

"Not at once. I proposed to her three times. She was as honest with me. She told me that she didn't love me either, that the only person in the world that she loved was her sister. It is partly for her sake that she is marrying me."

"I see. A thorough mariage de convenance."

"No," he answered. "Not altogether. We are excellent friends. I like her tremendously. She likes me, I think."

"Most satisfactory," Diana said, "in this world where there is so little honesty. But there, you are an honest person, Wildherne. Too honest sometimes. I have told you so before now. You deserve to marry someone honest as yourself. You wouldn't be happy with anyone else."

He stood up, terribly agitated. "Diana—this is good-bye, you know. I can't see you again. That won't matter to you, but to me—it's something rather sharp—something torn out of me ..." He broke off. He was trembling.

She looked up at him smiling. He looked very handsome standing there, with his yellow hair, the fine way that his head, thrust back, in its carriage and poise spoke of strength and courage and pride. Fine English. That's what he was. Dull as compared with Fine French or Italian or Spanish, but reliable in a way that no other aristocracy was. Diana liked him very much indeed.

"But, Wildherne—how foolish! Part? Why on earth? We're friends now, not lovers. We've had all this out over and over again. You know that you'll need me sometimes, just to talk to, to laugh with. Married men do need their women friends once and again. Part? What nonsense!"

"No! That's easy for you to say, but not for me. You are out of love, yes, and small trouble it has cost you, but I am as I was from the first. It must be broken. How often we've agreed about that! Haven't you told me again and again—'Wildherne, you must marry! You must marry! You must marry!'—We've repeated it, both of us, one to the other, like parrots. Well, now I'm doing it at last. And the condition is—I've told you always that it would be! I've told you ..."

He broke off, hesitated, then fell on his knees at her feet, burying his face in her lap. She stared out into the room above him, as so often before she had stared, stroking his hair gently and wondering, not about him but about herself—why she was for ever wanting what she could not have, why the savour went instantly from anything secured. An old wonder and eternal so long as the human heart beats!

He raised his head, looked with aching desire into her eyes.

"Oh, Diana, help me! Send me away now and let me never return. You don't want me. You're bored with me. You'll be glad to be rid of me."

She took his head between her hands, bent down and kissed his forehead, then, moving, stood up, and he also, they both, side by side, before the fire.

She caught his hand and held it tightly in hers.

"No, Wildherne, I don't love you. That's true enough. But I love no one, and most certainly not myself. Love eludes me. At most I see it a room away, always out of touch. But friendship, that's another thing. Of all the nonsense this stupid post-war time has brought us that at least is our merit, that we've learnt the value of friendship between men and women, how to manage it and hold it so that it lasts. I want you as a friend. I can't trust anybody around me. They are false, and so am I. But you are not false. I can trust you altogether, and so I want you for a friend. Your Janet can't grudge me that. Besides, if all I hear is true, she's not a grudging woman."

"Well enough for you," he answered impatiently. "You will use me at the times when someone has deserted you or spoken ill of you or irritated you. Good enough. But for myself, no. I tell you I love you, with my body as well as the rest of me. That being so I will see you no more. Stop loving you I cannot, but stop seeing you I can."

She looked at him. Then something she saw in his face caused her to smile a little cynically.

"Well," she said, holding out her hand. "Au revoir."

"No," he answered her. "Good-bye."

"Oh, I never say good-bye," she said, turning carelessly away from him and looking into the little round gold mirror above the fire. "Things crop up again and people return...."

He made as though he would speak, then swiftly, not looking back, left the room.