Читать книгу The Wire Tappers - Stringer Arthur - Страница 7

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“Tomorrow for the States—for me England, and Yesterday,”—murmured Frances Candler as she stood at her window looking down over the tangle and tumult of the Strand. “For me, England and Yesterday!” she repeated, and it was not until she had said the lines twice over that she remembered how she had first copied them into her day-book, during her early homesick weeks in New York.

It was the lassitude of her week at sea, and the loneliness of her second week in a London hotel, she told herself, that had brought about the change. If there were deeper and more dormant reasons, she was content to let sleeping dogs lie. But she did not deceive herself as to the meaning of the move. It was more than flight; it was surrender. It was, indeed, the bitter and desperate remedy for a bitter and desperate condition. For, inappositely, on the very brink of what seemed the waiting and widening vista of all her life, she had decided to go back to Oxford and her uncle’s home.

The steps that led to this determination were no longer clear to her questioning mind. She was also able, hour by brooding hour, to pile up against it ever new objections. But she clung to it blindly, with a forlorn tenacity of spirit that swept aside all momentary issues and all dread of the future. For out of that seeming defeat, she contended, she would wring her belated and her inner victory, even while her active imagination, playing lambently ahead of dragging reality, showed her how painful would be that return to old conditions and outgrown surroundings.

For a woman who has known the world to go back to such a roof is always a sign and a confession of defeat. Yet the sweep of her aggressive young mind, once made up, flung blindly aside each half-accumulated bar of indecision.

But was it fair to them?—she suddenly demanded of herself, as she pictured the scenes and the faces that would confront her, the gentle and mild-mannered women, the venerable and upright-hearted curate, so jealous of equity and honor, with his unbending singleness and narrowness of outlook. And as she asked this question each familiar figure seemed to stalk grimly from its muffling childhood memories and confront her, a challenging sentinel at the very threshold of that quiet little home which she had dreamed as always open to her, as always a harbor of ultimate refuge.

But now, could she face the unspoken deceit, the daily attrition of it, month after month and year after year? For clearly she foresaw what her life would be, from sunrise to sunset, from youth to old age, from the moment the quiet parsonage gate closed between her and the outer world. She foresaw it plainly, as distinctly and indelibly as though it had been set down in black and white before her eyes—the long and narrow and grimly defined path leading from a narrow and weather-beaten gate to a still narrower open grave. In summer time, in the quiet grounds behind the shielding gray walls, there would be the Provence roses to tend and the border-flowers to cut and trim, the sedate visiting and receiving, the frugal jam-making, the regular Bible-readings and the family prayers, the careful mending and remaking, the hemming of the clerical old-fashioned white cravats, the lonely cawing of the rooks through the quiet mornings and the long afternoons. And in the winter there would be the woollen jackets and cough mixtures to distribute throughout the parish, the stockings to be knit for the workhouse children, the long, silent games of chess in the mullion-windowed study, the lettering and numbering of the new books for the parish lending library, the pathetically threadbare suit of respectable broadcloth to press and repair, the summer linens and serges to be made over, the discussions of impending Disestablishment and the Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill, the languid flow of life within doors and the gentle diversions of life without, punctuated by long Sundays, in gloomy high-partitioned pews with faded crimson cushions.

“Oh, it is useless! It is too late, now!” she cried, hopelessly, as she paced the floor, and the weight of her past life hung heavy upon her. The roots of it lay too deep, she told herself, to be torn out. She was already too tainted with the dust of that outer world, too febrile, too passionately avid of movement and change. The contrast was too great. They would make it too hard for her, too rigidly exacting. For what did they know of the dark and complicated and compelling currents of the real world, lapped in their gentle backwaters of old-world clerical life, secluded and sheltered and untried! She would still have been one of them, if her paths had been theirs, if she had only breathed the quiet air they breathed!

“It is too hard!” she moaned, in her misery. The test of life itself was so crucial—that was the thought that kept recurring to her—the ordeal by fire was foredoomed to be so exacting! All their old lessons and creeds, which she had once chimed so innocently and so cordially, now seemed to fall empty and enigmatic on her older and wiser heart. They seemed to solve none of her imminent problems. Their mysticism only bewildered her. And she sat amid the roar of London, idle and sick at heart, unhearing and unseeing.

“I will do it!” she at last said aloud. “It will be my punishment!” She could no longer demand so much of life. She looked on existence, now, with older and disillusioned eyes. For what she had taken she must stand ready to pay. It would be her penance and penalty for past transgressions. And it would have to be borne; it was obligatory. It was not happiness or well-being that was at stake, she argued, in that new mood of amendment; it was something vast and undying and eternal within her, something that came before happiness itself, something she had seen her defiant and broken and dying father ignore and surrender and suffer for.

While this new expiatory passion was still warm in her blood, she packed her boxes, soberly, and then as soberly wrote to Durkin. It was not a long letter, but she spent much time and thought in its composition. In it, too, she seemed to cast off her last vestige of hesitation. For she felt that the very note of impersonality in its unnatural stiffness of phrasing was a new means of support. It was a support as clumsy and retarding as a child’s walking-chair, but she was willing enough to catch at it, whimsically, in those first tottering steps of renunciation.

“My Dear Jim,” she began, after much hesitation, and with many long and thoughtful pauses as she wrote, “it will surprise you, I know, but I have decided to go back to Oxford—to the Oxford I have so often told you about. Do not think it is only cruelty on my part, or cowardice, or self-interest. I have thought over everything long and carefully. And it has led, always led, to one end—that end is: neither you nor I must go on leading the lives we have been leading! It will hurt me, and it will hurt you, I believe, to break the ties that time has made. But there is, today, all the width of the Atlantic between us—and it is there, I think, that I am the coward. For it is only this that makes it possible for me to do what I’m doing. With you, I would bend to your will; here it will be easier. Now, above all things, both you and I must learn not to look on ourselves as beings apart from the rest of the world. If we have ever been enemies of society we must learn not to remember it—for it is this feeling, I know, which holds the key of our undoing. I have often wondered and looked to see in what ways I reproduced the atavistic conditions of the primitive woman—for they say that we evil doers are only echoes out of the past—but I’m going to do it no more. We are both of us ill-fitted for the things and the deeds we have drifted into. They make us suffer too much. It is work that should fall to souls dwarfed and stunted and benumbed. We are not morbid and depraved and blind; we have intelligence and feeling. We have only been unhappy and unlucky, let’s say. So now we must fight along and wait for better luck, as you used to put it. We are not what they call ‘recidivists.’ We are not abnormal and branded; we must fight away the deadly feeling that we are detached from the rest of the world, that mankind is organized and fighting against us, that we are the hunted, and all men the hounds! What we have done, we have done. But I know that we were both initiated into wrong-doing so quietly and so insidiously that the current caught us before we knew it. Yet I feel that I have none of the traits of the Female Offender, though in my anxiety and crazy search for causes and excuses I have even taken my cephalic index and tested my chromatic perception and my tactile sensitiveness and made sure that I responded normally to a Faraday current! Yes, we are both too normal to succeed happily in the ways we began. . . . I shall miss you, but I shall always love you. Oh, Jim, pray for me; as I, daily, shall pray for you! I can’t write more now. Go back to your work, though it means being hungry and lonely and unhappy, fight out the problem of your amplifier, and struggle along with your transmitting camera, until you accomplish something we can both take pride in and be happy over! Sometime, later, when I write, I shall be able to explain everything more fully. . . . I was eleven days in the hospital, and crossed on the Nieuw Amsterdam. There will always be a scar—but a very small one—on my arm. That will be the only reminder. Good-bye, dear Jim, and God bless and keep you, always, in the right.”

She read over the letter, slowly, dispassionately, and fought back the temptation to write further, to fling more of her true feeling into it. That, at best, would be only a cruel kindness.

As she folded and sealed the letter she felt that she was sealing down many years of her past youth. She already felt that she had passed over some mysterious Great Divide, that some vast morainic loop already walled her back from her former existence. And then, as a sudden, rushing sense of her isolation swept over her, she broke down, in that very hour of her ironic triumph, and wept miserably, passionately, hopelessly.

Her misery clung to her all that day, until, late in the afternoon, she caught the first glimpse of Oxford from her compartment window. At one touch it carried her back to the six long years of her girlhood, for she had been little more than a child when first taken from the dubious care of her father—and the happiest stretch of her life had been lived within sound of Oxford’s tranquil bells.

It had been her first plan, when she left the train, to take a carriage and drive leisurely through the old university town. It would be her one hour of freedom, before crossing that final Rubicon; it was only, she protested, a human enough hesitation before the ultimate plunge. Vividly and minutely she remembered the town, as she had seen it from the familiar hills, wrapt in sunlight and purplish shadows by day, lying cool and dark and tranquil under the summer moon by night, steeped in the silences and the soft mistiness of the river valley, with here and there a bell tinkling and a roof glimmering through the gloom. She even used to say she found a strange comfort in the number of these bells and in the thought of their wakefulness throughout the night. But now, through some underground circuit of memory, they carried her thoughts back to the clanging brilliance of Broadway at midnight, to the movement and tumult and press of light-hearted humanity. And by contrast, they now seemed to her to toll lugubriously. The quiet city about her seemed tainted with antiquity, autumnal, overshadowed by the grayness of death. It almost stifled her. She had forlornly hoped that the calm beauty of that town of bells and towers would still fall as a welcome balm on her torn feelings. But she had changed—oh, how she had changed! It was not, she told herself, the mere fruit of physical exhaustion. Her one desire on that day, indeed, was to reach that condition of bodily weariness which would render her indifferent to all mental blows. It was only her past, whimpering for its own.

She still felt the sheer need of fatigue to purge away that inner weariness that had settled over her soul, so on second thoughts she turned homeward, and went on foot, through the paling English afternoon. Often, as a girl, she had walked in over the neighboring hills; and there seemed something more in keeping with her return to go back alone, and quietly. And as she walked she seemed to grow indifferent to even her own destiny. She felt herself as one gazing down on her own tangled existence with the cool detachment of a mere spectator. Yet this was the landscape of her youth, she kept telling herself, where she had first heard nightingales sing, where she had been happy and hopeful and looked out toward the unknown world with wide and wondering eyes. But the very landscape that once lay so large and alluring now seemed cramped and small and trivial. It seemed like a play-world to her, painted and laid out and overcrowded, like the too confining stage-scene of a theatre.

The afternoon was already late when the familiar square tower of the church and the gray walls of the parsonage itself came into view. She gazed at them, abstracted and exalted, and only once she murmured: “How different, oh, how different!”

Then she opened the gate of that quiet home, slowly and deliberately, and stepped inside. The garden was empty.

One great, annihilating sponge-sweep seemed to wipe five long years, and all their mottled events, from her memory. Then as slowly and deliberately she once more closed the gate. The act seemed to take on that dignity attaching to the ceremonial, for with that movement, she passionately protested to herself, she was closing the door on all her past.